Just about anything. Too many coworkers don't read any technical books at all. Some will pick up books to learn specific tools or languages, which is better, but not enough...

If you made me pick one, though...

The Practice of Programming - Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike - http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Brian-W-Kernighan...

I think "The Practice of Programming" was and is very good.

https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Addison-Wesley-P...

I've been reading _The Practice of Programming_ (Pike, Kernighan) lately; it's mainly geared towards Java and C/C++ programmers, but even as a DevOps engineer I'm finding a lot of it useful.

https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Addison-Wesley-P...

Try having your team read these books:

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Solid-Code-Microsoft-Programmi...

http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Addison-Wesley-Pr...

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Const...

I know these are old books and are C and C++ oriented, but it helped me a lot during my formative years and helped me transition from being a decent programmer to being a decent engineer. They are short books which are well written and not very dense.

The efficiency and comments part read like a tl;dr version of Kernighan & Pike The Practice of Programming[1], which, I might add, is an excellent read. As for coding conventions, I quite like OpenBSD's (man style)[2], which are also present on FreeBSD. Though I rarely write C these days, I have to read some every now and then, and code from BSD projects following those conventions feels very readable.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Addison-Wesley-Pr... [2] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=style&sekti...

Many of these are elaborated on in the more recent (1999) "The Practice of Programming." Excellent book. http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Brian-W-Kernighan...

There are a few books that will make you a better coder.

start with this ================ http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Brian-W-Kernighan...

Since you'll likely be in the web space read:

PHP cookbook Oreilly's Definitive guide to javascript O'Reilly Definitive guide to html & css O'Reilly books on the LAMP stack ox XAMPP stack

PHP ======= you can learn alot by reading the coding examples from the php manual

http://php.net/manual/en/index.php

just google search "php man <search term>"

MySql ======== Most of the time you'll only be doing simply query, so you don't have to worry too much about query languages. You can copy & paste mysql code

==============================

Learn JQuery or MooTools, so you can do some AJAX =================================================

Download PHP Eclipse as your SDK ==========================================

Once you're down with those references play around with the Zend Framework

It's not hard at all. PHP is an easy coding language to learn. Though some employers want you to know ASP. B

I was in the same situation. I got laid off 6 months ago, and picked up PHP>HTML>CSS>JAVASCRIPT> reading Oreilly books (you can get them off bittorrent). I have don't have a tech background. My degree is in philosophy. I built my own website.

http://www.distractmefrom.com

===========================================

It just takes time, and ALOT of practice & coding error & learning from debugging.