Dave++

Here are a few of my favourite things (programming related things anyway):

Books

Effective and More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers

Two wonderful books which show have taught me a hell of a lot about programming in C++ and in general. They are not books to learn C++ from, but anyone who has a working knowledge of C++ will benefit hugely from these books.

Design Patterns by The Gang of Four by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides

This is a book which takes you from programmer to architect. It shows you re-usable ways of making the design of your code better. The patterns themselves are divided into three classes of design; Creational, Structural and Behavioural.

A Guide to Python’s Magic Methods by Rafe Kettler

This book has really helped me develop my python skills. It talks about the “Magic Methods” in python, these are the special methods surrounded by double underscores such as __init__() and __new__(). They help make very customisable classes such as custom lists, dictionaries, callable objects, etc. and overload operators so you can use +, – *, == as is natural for some classes.

Other blogs/websites

Code Project is a site for posting/reading programming articles and also asking questions.

The Endeavour John Cook’s blog where he posts about statistics, python and generally awesome topics.