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Taking Your Programming Skills to the Next Level?
An anonymous reader asks: "About 6 years ago I graduated with a degree in Computer Science. Since that time I've been working on and off as a programmer, however I feel that my programming skills haven't really progressed to the next level as I had hoped. I guess part of the problem is that my work environment hasn't been especially technical or challenging, so I really need to try and improve my skills independently. What strategies did Slashdot readers use to improve their programming skills Which books are useful in this area?"
Write a driver for Linux - preferably a useful driver that 14-17 year old demographic (Which pretty much covers every Linux user) will want to use. With every point kernel release, you'll be forced to update your driver, sometimes having to completely rewrite it to keep up with trivial (and seemingly useless) binary kernel interface changes, and at all times wondering if there even is a binary kernel interface.
Motivation to update your driver won't be a problem because every time a new kernel is released and your driver breaks, you'll get hundreds of reminders (death threats) from Gentoo users who just ran emerge '--universe -09* --funroll-loops' on their Mom's old E-Machines box, that you need to fix your driver.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
> Looks like you, like me, are a hippie under these definitions.
Looks to me like you wasted good money reading a piece of shit book written by an idiot. Perhaps he writes non-technical articles for idiots and has therefore decided not to do any research?