Always read.

Always be reading. It is the single most important thing you can do to both and improve your game and improve your income.

In 1996 when I graduated from college and got my first salaried job, I met a contractor named Scott. For whatever reason, he took interest in me and among other gems, gave me the above advice. We were on a DoD project coding a large system in C++. Scott had referred me to nearly a dozen books that were "must reads" in the field. Here's a sample of them (I still remember these to this day):

• Code Complete by Steve McConnell
• OO Analysis and Design by Grady Booch
• Design Patterns by GoF
• Effective C++ / More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
• C++ How to Program by Harvey & Paul Deitel
  

I'm not going to go on about how I became the project architect overnight. What I will say is that I bought and read all of the above books. In just a few months I went from a "new grad" to hanging in there with contractors who had been in the game a while. My stock went way up. Management wanted to keep me around. Because of my 140 I.Q.? Hardly. More becasue I gave a damn about what I was doing, and it showed through my personal growth.

Read good books.
I'm not talking about how books - the 900 page tomes addressing Ruby on Rails. I am talking more about why books. Books such as these have really made a huge difference in the quality of my code.

• Any of Martin Fower's Signature Series books


• Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer


• Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell

These are not "new" books. These are especially good to reference when prepping for interviews. There is just so much good material in there.

Do I practice what I preach? I sure do. My current deskside reference is from the Fowler signature series - "Refactoring to Patterns". It's great stuff.