How to Choose The Educational Literature in the Field of IT

Educational literature (textbooks, educational-methodical manuals) is one of the main means of presenting a material to students. It forms the basis for the formation of competences of educational institution's graduates, on the basis of their independent acquisition of knowledge, skills and abilities in their professional field, and experience of creative activity. Therefore, the level of university graduates' education, the quality of vocational education they receive, and hence their competitiveness in the labor market, largely depends on the quality of educational literature. 

IT educational literature is a very broad concept that includes both professional literature for IT professionals and books for beginners, i.e. people just mastering the computer and the Internet.

There is a program educational literature, i.e. literature for IT students in a particular discipline, and educational literature for those who study this field of knowledge on their own or strive for continuous excellence. After all, as you know, one of the fundamental commandments of a successful programmer is to never stop learning, which is invariably associated with reading professional literature. 

Professional literature for those who study IT covers such topics as databases and DBMS, design, software development and testing, system administration, languages, techniques and technology programming, computer graphics and web design, operating systems, etc.

When choosing literature, it is important to understand that in the age of IT-technologies a lot of pseudo-scientific literature appeared. Sometimes it is difficult to understand the quality of the material because of the rich choice, and there is no one to ask for advice. Often young people, developing in the IT sphere, are interested in what successful IT specialists read? What books do they recommend? The Pro-Papers turned to its experts for clarification and collected useful advice on a selection of educational literature for IT specialists and those who are just studying.

So, the IT-sphere is updated every year with new subject areas (for example, blockchain (cryptoindustry), machine learning, Internet of things (IoT)), programming languages ​​(Scala, Swift, Go, Kotlin, Rust, Solidity), frameworks to existing programming languages and professions (smart contract developer, blockchain engineer, big data analyst, Go or Swift developers, etc.).

In order to be constantly on the crest of the wave, specialists need to continuously learn new things. Books on IT, books with successful cases of industry leaders, articles on Internet resources, IT courses and specialized conferences help in the development and expansion of knowledge. Often, IT specialists read the literature in the original language, since foreign publishers set trends and usually translated books appear with a decent time delay.

IT-specialists read first of all, specialized materials and books on their subject area. If you are a Ruby, you will certainly know the "Ruby Path" book, if you are an experienced rubist, you must have read "Metaprogramming in Ruby 2" and "Effective Testing with RSpec 3", if you are a Go programmer, you probably mastered "Go Programming Language". There are also bestsellers on project management methodologies, team management or testing tools for project managers and testers.

Our experts cited the example of a relatively new 3 books, which, as it seems to us, are useful to read for IT-specialists regardless of specialization.

Git for a Professional Programmer

For over a decade, any teamwork with code in IT companies has been conducted in the version control system. Every developer knows about the Github service or analogues (Gitlab, Bitbucket). Confident use of such a tool as a version control system allows improving the speed of both personal and team work on a project. The book "Git for a professional programmer" will allow you to feel like a duck to water when working with versioned code. The book is useful not only to programmers, but also testers and project managers.

Grokking Algorithms

The book is about the basic, commonly used algorithms, approaches and data structures. The basic data structures and algorithms are given in the book, in detail and clearly written, and even illustrated with excellent examples. The book is suitable for beginners (not necessarily "mathematical mindset"), as well as developers with experience who want to refresh the memory of the basics that have been forgotten.

How Does Google Work

Excellent book, that promotes honesty, initiative and openness to everything new. Moreover, the initiative should not be punished in case of failure (as an example, an unsuccessful google wave project is given). The Google company encourages its employees to act - as in the modern world hypothesis testing is cheap both in time and in money. We need to check more and make prototypes. The ideology of Google within the framework of project selection is to support strong projects, to give up weak projects as early as possible, even if many resources have already been invested.

For ordinary users who want to acquire or improve computer skills, there are tutorials for working on the Internet or office programs.

It is important to remember that books on IT technologies are usually extremely practical, and therefore you need to "become a skilled hand" so that the material correctly settles in your head. So, if you only begin to study the IT sphere, remember that only with practice you can become a skilled hand at IT.

It is worth to experience examples from the book immediately in the process of reading. If a technology is completely new to you and you have never met it either in practice or in theory, then most likely you will not understand all the information in the book for the first time. That is why it is recommended to return to the book again after the first reading and some practice.

Read, learn and do not be afraid to discover something new. Only by working on yourself you can become a professional in your field.