I'm honestly thinking about writing a book. An introductory book to software development for people who want to switch careers and don't have a CS background.
It would explain the things we take for granted:
- how computers work
- how networks/the internet works
- what are algorithms, complexity and when it matters
- programming styles (fn, OOP, etc.)
- what are DBs
- maybe an introduction to architectures up to distributed and serverless
Know of such a book/course already?
@sb I like the idea of lowering the bar for career changers, but what you listed sound almost like the full curriculum of my four years of apprenticeship in IT from 1998 with a few adaptions to today. So having a single book to covers all that sounds very ambitious.
On the other hand there are the $anything For Dummies series of books which IMO do a good job as an entry into a new field.
@doeme I don't think anyone needs a deep coverage of all these topics, but a basic understanding of the concepts helps. For example, understanding more or less how algorithmic complexity works is useful, knowing how mergesort or quicksort are implemented not really.
I have to check out some of these "for dummies" books, I always hated them because they take the dummy part too far...
@sb that is about the level we got taught in our apprenticeship and then it took me some more years of work and constant learning to get proficient in most of these things.
Don't get me wrong, I would fully appreciate such a compendium but I also think that it is very, very ambitious.
Stéphane
Dominik Berner