Becoming A Better Programmer In 6 Months: The First 20 days

Denis Gobo — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:55:00 GMT

Here is an update of what I accomplished in the first 20 days

Read the book Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

Read the book Extending SSIS 2005 with Script

Read 1 chapter of Learning Python, Second Edition

Played around with the July CTP of SQL Server 2008

So in the first 20 days I have read 3 books however two books are very thin. I will need that time later when I start on much thicker books like Code Complete and Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying

I will also make a small change to the list instead of Expert SQL Server 2005 Integration Services I will read Core Python Programming

I also started tinkering with Python, those guys are a bunch of jokers. if you type "import this" in a Python command line window you get this output

win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
>>>

So that is one of the easter eggs hidden in Python.

In the past week I also played around with the new date data types in SQl server 2008, I have filed a bug/typo which I found in Books On Line.
This week I will concentrate on the book Learning Python, Second Edition during weekends and lunch hours, in the evening I will read Practices of an Agile Developer

This is it for the update. The original post can be found here: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/denis_gobo/archive/2007/07/16/1746.aspx

A more detailed post about the first 10 days can be found here: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/denis_gobo/archive/2007/07/25/1935.aspx

I am also glad to say that most of the people I tagged in the original post have responded

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Becoming A Better Programmer In 6 Months: The First 20 days