I was overwhelmed by the amount of things I needed to know but hadn't learned yet. My journey learning to program, and my experience at my first job as a software engineer were the inspiration for this book.
I spent one year writing The Self-Taught Programmer. It was an exciting and rewarding experience. I treated my book like a software project. After I finished writing it, I created a program to pick out all of the code examples from the book and execute them in Python to make sure all 300+ examples worked properly. Then I wrote software to add line numbers and color to every code example. Finally, I had a group of 200 new programmers "beta read" the book to identify poorly explained concepts and look for any errors my program missed.
Cory Althoff is an author, programmer, and speaker. He is best known for his book The Self-Taught Programmer, which has been published in seven languages and introduced the term "self-taught programmer" into the common lexicon. Book Authority named The Self-Taught Programmer one of the greatest programming books of all time, and The Next Web listed it as one of the ten books that will help you become a better software engineer. Over 200K developers are part of the self-taught programmer community he created through his popular Facebook group, blog, newsletter, and Udemy course. In 2019, Cory gave the opening keynote speech at Pycon JP. Cory lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter.