Re: How do you learn to program professionally?

Sorry, Radek, but you can’t be serious about How to Learn to Program Professionally.
How can you recommend C++ to a beginner? How can you recommend a reference manual?

If someone really wants to learn to program well, they should get a programming textbook.
You’re right that most textbooks try to teach syntax
and other quirks of a particular language instead of teaching readers how to program.

To me, knowing how to program means knowing how to program with objects, and that takes
object-oriented thinking. A beginner needs a language closer to the way people
think. It should free you from having to think in terms of
allocating and freeing memory and similar concerns. Choose a language that
lets you work at a higher level of abstraction.

Once a beginner has tried the basic OOP techniques and learned to work with them, they can get on
with further study. Start with design patterns, unit tests, UML and so on, then move to more advanced techniques in their
own area of expertise.

Walk into a company that develops software professionally and write,
in Radek Hulán’s words, “those 500 lines in three hours,” and people will
wonder what you were thinking. Software development isn’t the 110-meter hurdles or a sandcastle you
can knock down and rebuild every other day.

Becoming a good programmer is a long-distance run. There’s no
instant recipe for it.