I have pondered this question before and I have seen people recommending "Philosophy of software design" by John Ousterhout, but my qualms with Clean Code is not that it needs a substitute, its just that its a fairly simple set of concepts about which Bob makes a big deal. I did read some of his books, but I realized its only about 10% of what makes a competent software engineer. My suggestions to people starting out or even seasoned programmers are that get an idea of what he advocates (TDD, SOLID and all that) but then design of programs is just a small part.(And I also can debate the usefulness of both TDD and SOLID. Personal opinion coming: they are great for small or greenfield projects but almost always don't hold up in the real world).Learn about other kinds of (much more effective) testing like System/Integration testing, Property-based testing. Spend a lot of time learning about databases and SQL. Maybe get into somewhat esoteric topics like constraint solvers and logic programming. You may not use these but it helps to know there's a wide world out there, and they do bend your brain enough to enable you to think differently.
Time is limited. It does matter what we spend it on.
joshdavham|1 year ago
Definitely. Knowing this does make choosing what to learn easier though!