Man, how did they not work up a system like morse code? That's horrible. Mad props for the patience, though.

- The Tao Te Ching, especially Ron Hogan's translation (freely downloadable here: http://beatrice.com/wordpress/tao-te-ching)

- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby

- Getting Things Done, David Allen

- Gimp, Marc Zupan

- Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows

- Leadership Step by Step, Joshua Spodek (full disclosure: me, https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/...)

The suggestion I consider more valuable is to focus more on active behavior than relatively passive reading. Of course, still read. But it's easy to read more and more, telling yourself you're getting more perspective. You are, but nothing changes your perspective like actually moving.

Even if you don't know what will work best -- meditation, fitness, art, music, travel, cooking, gardening, starting a business, etc -- starting with something, even if you soon abandon it, will lead you to things you love and that develop you faster than reading alone. Plus activity will make what you read more meaningful.

I include my book because it's specifically a book of exercises that lead to developing social and emotional skills designed to build on each other.

Folks who did not grow up touch typing, though, simply learned to construct a longer-lasting mental model, which they can then write out however slowly. Think of it as a bigger buffer. In rare cases it can become enormous, and people write entire novels in their head before ever putting ink on paper (famous example: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", which was written at a rate of about one word every 2 minutes).

Or, they learned to create and capture design decisions in higher-density media (like diagrams or pseudocode), which, again, can then be typed in more slowly.

It's probably much better to judge developers by the quality of their output than how fast they type--especially since most software spends way longer in production and maintenance than it does being developed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butter...