There is saying that if you learn from your mistakes, you will only going to learn few things, but if you learn from other's mistake, you can learn lot of things in short time, and what could be better way to learn from someone's experience then reading books. Programming as a career is about constant learning and updating yourself, but unfortunately there is no right way to begin. School and Colleges are far behind when it comes to real world programming, and every computer science graduate is not lucky to work in a company which is great in training. Only viable option is to read book and follow advice from the great programmer and authors who are gone to that path. I still regret that why I didn't come to know about Clean Code when I started programming. These are the books which can change your career, can make you better programmer. These books are more about a way of thinking, organizing, and becoming better at the craft of software engineering. They won't make you better at any particular programming language e..g Java but they will help you to become a better Programmer.