Esotropiart

So I've been thinking about what I'm doing in life as far as occupation goes. It's not something I like to think about much because I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. And well, let's face it, I'm pretty much all grown up by now. At any rate, I chose one path several years ago: web design and development. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. I don't particularly regret it, but I'm not absolutely certain it is what I want to be doing.

Even if I don't do it as a "career" per se, it's where I'm at right now. If for no other reason, I enjoy learning for the sake of improving my own web site, even if the professional jobs aren't as interesting to me. In fact, I have a big list of ideas in my head about how I want to improve my site. I've been rather hesitant in the last year or two at making significant changes. I have skill enough to implement just about anything, but I feel my methodologies will be pretty shoddy at best. So I've been wanting to learn more about good development skills.

I don't feel I'm horribly lacking in design knowledge. HTML, CSS, and such things are rather simple to get the hang of, even the advance trickery stuff. But my programming and coding style I feel leaves much to be desired. I have a bunch of artwork I've been wanting to add to my site, but I'm getting sick and tired of how I have to manually enter stuff into a database. I started working on adding admin screens to make it more practical to add content to my site, but I felt I wasn't approaching it in the best possible manner. I found myself repeating some of the same steps, writing the same code as when I made the blog writing admin screens. It's about time I learn some better coding practices.

In order to improve my programming gung fu (and general nerdiness), I've decided to read a programming book. I've read several before, mostly in part. I have a decent grasp of scripting languages, but I don't have many good examples of how to write good code. Most programming books really stink at describing the reasoning behind well written and badly written code. Of course this is somewhat subjective, and there are tons of "experts" out there who contradict each other on what "the most excellent way" is. Nevertheless, I am choosing to pursue better knowledge in the area of software construction, for the betterment of Esotropiart :). Oh, and it will probably help my future occupational prospects too, but that's beside the point.

I'll be reading a book titled, "Code Complete" (2nd Edition) by Steve McConnell. It comes highly recommended through a good programming friend of mine, Marquis Eden. And of course anyone in the field of programming probably knows all about - it's rather famous and highly regarded throughout the industry. I borrowed the book once from the library already. Finishing a book in time before having to return it (especially an 800 page one, full of boring technical information) is pretty much a hopeless venture for me. I'm a slow reader. I decided after a pointlessly long delay to go ahead and buy the book, in faith that it would help me in a manner that justifies the price. I rarely buy books. I just received the book today and have started the slow process of parsing the material found within. In other words, I'm still making it through the Preface. Hopefully Code Complete will give me some direction and help me make sense of and give structure to all this useless code floating around in my head.