Learning to read

One of the most important skills to practice as a programmer is your ability to read code. In fact, I would say that more than half of your time as a programmer is likely to be spent reading code, rather than writing it.

As such, you will find that the majority of the first half of this series will be primarily focused on reading code that you will be initially unfamiliar with. This is not meant to confuse you, but rather to get you used to the idea that in order to be a successful programmer, you will need to practice reading code.

"What code?" you might ask? Well, pretty much any code! Seriously, just as reading books helps you both as a reader and a writer, so does it help to read other people's code.

I highly encourage you to browse around public open source code repositories for code to read (GitHub is a great resource for this). Even if you don't understand every bit of it, maybe you'll learn something from reading some parts, or maybe you'll find a bug to fix!

Throughout the rest of this tutorial series, I will also try to include links to various open source code as further illustrations of some of the concepts being discussed.