Most of us are Programmers Today Because

Clean Coder: A code of conduct by Professional Programmers  by Robert C. Martin

Bob talks about the responsibility and the honor of being a professional programmer. A few gems:

Professionals spend time caring for their profession (making a case for spending time on improving your skills)

Professionalism is a loaded term. Certainly it is a badge of honor and pride, but it is also a marker of responsibility and accountability.

Most of us are programmers today because we got something to work once and we want that feeling again.

Treat software the sculptor treats clay – continuously shape and mold it.

Bob feels that you should know a sizable chunk of your field, if you want to be a professional:

Do you know what a Nassi-Schneiderman chart is? If not, why not? Do you know the difference between a Mealy and a Moore state machine? You should.  Could you write a quicksort without looking it up? Do you know what the term “Transform Analysis” means? Could you perform a functional decomposition
with Data Flow Diagrams? What does the term “Tramp Data” mean? Have you heard the term “Conascence”? What is a Parnas Table?

A wealth of ideas, disciplines, techniques, tools, and terminologies decorate the last fifty years of our field. How much of this do you know? If you want to be a professional, you should know a sizable chunk of it and constantly be increasing the size of that chunk.

Except for Nassi-Scneiderman and Data Flow Diagrams, I had to look up most of the others – kind of a rude awakening of being out of touch.

Meta:

I stumbled into this book when I was reading a blog post on “Code Like a Chef”. This book was one of the suggested readings. I just got started.