Looking back at my career and life as a programmer, there were plenty of different ways I improved my programming skills - reading code, writing code, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching screencasts and more.

A new book from Packt on Threaded Programming that acts as a guide to building scalable, high performance applications using parallel programming with C# has been published. Written by Gastón C. Hillar, C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner's Guide will help users develop applications that run several tasks, and manage parallelized processes and threads.

"My previous post discussed my thoughts on how to read programming books, here comes my reading list of programming/computer science books..."

WordPress is a blogging program that is gaining both popularity and converts. Consequently, there are many books available to help you learn how to best use WordPress, whether you have an account on the WordPress.com site or a site hosted elsewhere running WordPress.

An essay regarding what is the better way for new users to learn Linux. "There are many ways to learn Linux, and I can't think of one as being the 'best'. Of course, something may work for some users while failing miserably for others.

Can computers learn? That's a deep question worthy of any philosopher's time, but we're not philosophers: we're coders, right? So, rather than try to prove or disprove what exactly a computer is capable of, we're going to pass away an idle hour or two producing a little game that actually does make computers learn - or at least gives the impression!

Teaching young students or even your own kids to learn or be interested in programming can be really daunting. However, there are free programming languages that are designed to teach children the basic concepts and elements required in traditional programming that you can use to get the job done quite easily.

Let’s face it, most technical and computer books are boring, and reading the texts cover-to-cover is nothing less than a slog. However, there are some exceptions, including a number of books apropos for system administrators. In fact, there are three books I highly recommend and are mandatory reading for my staff.

Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development is a new book from Packt that is packed with expert advice on all aspects of programming with Joomla! Written by James Kennard, this book is an invaluable reference guide that users will turn to again and again as they work with Joomla!