Not as cool as "Eat More Chick'n", and certainly not an advocation of Dickensian code (that'd be longwinded), this is my new code exercise mantra.
As any good code citizen who has dogged eared a copies of The Pragmattic Programmer and Practices of an Agile Developer knows, if you're not learning you're not growing.
Tip #8: "Invest regularly in your knowledge portfolio. Make learning a habit."
- The Pragmatic Programmer
And it's not just about learning syntax, but about patterns and practices that will continue to apply long after the flavor of the month becomes the punchline of a joke.
As a freelance developer, I primarily code alone. So, I love it when I have the opportunity to be exposed to someone elses code and learn how other people are tackling similar tasks and challenges. This is a practice that Scott Hanselman has been promoting in his blog as he examines and discusses code from various projects weekly.
Learning topics such as how to code Actionscript 3.0 or fundamentals of AJAX are certainly essentially. But the next iteration of those technologies may well wash away a good portion of that knowledge as it becomes obsolete. It's so crucial not to forsake strengthening knowledge of the overarching principles that make us good at what we do for years to come. Scott H and X struck this chord with me this week.
Books: We need more So What, Now What and What For? and less just What - Hanselman
Code Leader book - Paul Cauldwell
As I'm reading code, I'm looking to learn not only how something works, but why it's being done that way and to what end. I can't download enough code these days.
Such as:
http://brianchau.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/learning-actionscript-3-eseminar-tutorial-files/ - Actionscript 3 from super basic to simple MVC
http://alivepdf.bytearray.org/ - Generate PDFs from Actionscript 3
http://casaframework.org/ - agile framework for Actionscript 2
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/ - deep linking for Flash
http://www.davidtucker.net/category/cairngorm/ - David Tucker's Cairngorm Tutorials (MVC for Flex)