I had my second interview today with the director .. He seems to be nice at first.. when he asked me do you read books I honestly said I don’t...he then asked me if I had like programming books with me.. I said no since all the lectures are all in ppt ... and I believe that is enough during colllege.. and they didn’t require us to have books.. I just felt that .. he did not like me just because of that..I like the company but I guess being honest also kills the opportunity..the second interview mainly focuses on fitting with the company culture...I just thought the interview went really fast.. It just seemed that they had this “ahh next!!” Kind of attitude when I left the room

Sounds like he completely caught you off guard with that.

The parts with "enough during college" and "they didn't require" might be true, but i think the question is is more about your personal interest and if you are a person who widens his horizon without someone demanding it. You could have survived that by giving examples of how you're using the internet as a source of knowledge, but in the moment of being caught of guard that's not as easy as it seems afterwards. Your profile says "love to learn", play that. Show enthusiasm, but if that's your second interview, don't feel bad.

Appendix A:
Write that guy and ask what books he would recommend. You may have failed this time, but if you show that you can adapt, it may help you later. And i would want to know it out of pure curiosity.

Appendix B:
I got two book recommendations for you
"The pragmatic programmer" &
"How to win friends and influence people"

Both easy to consume and pretty enlightening for a dev.

Good luck next time

@CWins Thanks for the tips.. I just don’t know I’m more of a person who likes to explore things than read a book.. I’m kind of a hands on person.. where I like to tackle a problem and do research on what I need to use to make that happen..hopefully they’d still reconsider me..and actually I told them I love to learn new things.. And what I’ve been working on although it is kind of.. out of the scope of their tech stack...

@rui725 That often works and can be faster than books but books focus on a subject snd usually explores it thoroughly.

Also, many good books handles concepts you might not find online.

A favorite is “Clean code”. Its about how to write code thats easy to understand later and how to use coding style to avoid subtle bugs.

The concepts work for any language.

@Voxera True ... Technology is pretty vast you know and changing.. we might be reading a book from this year about c# and in 2020 they would have integrated new things in a new book.. It just doesnt really make sense to read something that will be changed later on.. I guess this is me not being programmer.. I kind of fed up with all the technologies that keeps changing.. and does not stick to with the old ways...

I don’t really have a specific technology that I want to have.. right now I’m just trying adapt to the demands of the job market and get a job.. I know it sounds awful.. but I guess one thing that is good about it is that I have the determination to do what it takes to get the job..

@rui725
I'm also prefer learning in a do-and-experiment way.

That's why the books i recommended are not classical learning books. Some knowledge outdates quickly, other knowledge stays state of the art a lot longer. "How to win friends..." is from a pre-computer time and still incredibly valuable in current work environment.

I had suggested books at uni which I didn't read. I didn't even go to half my lectures and forget labs. It was all pointless to me because give me a problem to solve and I'll Google it. Doing coursework and revision the day before an exam got me a first on everything.

In my new company we are strongly encouraged to read books. We have stacks of them on Angular and c# to agile development and object orientated philosophy. I've discovered that reading books is more about finding out what you don't know that you don't know and really does make you a better software developer and team member.

@rui725 there are books tackling languages and frameworks which can be outdated in 5 years time. But there are also books which contain patterns. A pattern isnt language specific and is basically a concept. Since these concepts dont change its not a waste of money. I just started reading a 15 year old pattern book. And I do learn some great things.

And with questions like that you can always say why you dont have books (because some become outdated) and how you solve that issue (reading blogpost by certain people for example). That way you are honest and the interviewer knows that you will expand your knowledge but not through books.

Ive got 8 language specific books of which 5 are outdated, three of them are about basics of C++ and also discuss patterns.

Ive got 4 books which are no language specific patterns books. Two of them are available for free on the internet. But reading paper works better in my eyes.

@rui725 Do I know ;)

My programming journey started with basic on the sinqlair zx80, 1981, and have been a ride through turbo pascal, c, visual basic 1-6, vbscript/jscript in asp, asp.net, c# with html (before css and javascript) up to now react.

Thats why I love the business, you never get bored for long ;)

@craig939393 That’s cool I guess having no specialized language has its cons .. I guess I just want to get that job first, find my specialized programming language and then read a book...

@Codex404 yea I wish I had alot of time to read but I wanna get hands on experience as much as I can so I can build my portfolio and learn technologies that are on demand..

@Voxera you are a microsoft fan I guess

@rui725 just hands on you dont always learn the things that make you stand out from others though. Its better to have a few projects with great code than a lot of meh code.
Ive helped with hiring a few times and really we just look at the code, not to see if it works but to see how one thinks and tackles problems.

@rui725 not fan ;)

My own vps’s are linux, but having used multiple different editors and ide’s my 2 preffered are turbo pascal and visial studio.

We have used linux a lot but c#, sql server and iis just was less fuss.

And c# is a fantastic language.

@Codex404 sometimes it’s hard to catch up on technologies that you dont know... like for example in college they only taught html,css and php with db... where as I need to catch up on using js, nodejs, atleast one front end framework, responsive web dev.. MVC.. Django... In PL we studied in C# C++, Java and also android, Cobol.. Theories in Automata, algorithms, data structures and compiler theories not to mention some logic circuits.. it kinda gets out of hand you know when you had like big concepts .. and still confused where to start or how to plan things ... that’s probably why I kind of have like a bad habit for coding...

@Voxera what are some of the perks of using c# I was only taught oop structs collections loops ifs exception handling.. then I only self studied some advance stuff like delegates linq reflection, generics and attributes..which I think are pretty cool concepts...

@rui725 linq, lambdas, generics, extension methods when used right makes for very expressive and clean code.

Recently they added python like tuples that makes it very easy to return multiple values without creating extra classes or using out variables.

Soon there will be performance optimized types for ranges to avoid allocations, non nullable reference types and immutable.

They are building more and more functional concepts into the language while also improving performance.

Async and await, easy threading and the parallels library is another performance help.

Of cause, much of this can be found in other languages, but c# is my preferred one.

That said, its not always the best one for every job but its almost never completely wrong either :)

You can get monster performance if that is what you want but you can also use a very verbose easy to write style.

And with .net core you are not locked to windows any more as MS has made it native to linux and mac.