Besides some of the very, very obvious (don’t copy/paste 100 lines of code, make it a function! Write comments for your future self who has forgotten this codebase 3 years from now!), I’m not sure how to write clean, efficient code that follows good practices.
In other words, I’m always privating my repos because I’m not sure if I’m doing some horrible beginner inefficiency/bad practice where I should be embarrassed for having written it, let alone for letting other people see it. Aside from https://refactoring.guru, where should I be learning and what should I be learning?
Read a book on writing good code. There are several ones available. It’s a common thing. Especially for self-taught programmers. And also if you studied… Usually once you progress to complex projects or have to collaborate in bigger teams, you have to learn this. And that’s also why there is a demand (and supply) of books on the subject.
And I always recommend books. They’re a way better way to learn than most of the other stuff you’ll find (in my eyes). And usually written by smart people and structured the right way to teach you something fast and effective. You’ll get the whole picture (something you don’t get when curating your information yourself), it takes like less than half of the time of watching online tutorial videos to finish a book including the assignments. And generally: learn it in a structured way if you want to move past the basics.
This is a very good comment for me because I usually hate tutorial videos with a passion. It’s better with transcripts now, but it’s still harder to CTRL+F a video for what I want. And like most human beings, I read faster than people talk in videos. I definitely have already been convinced as to how unsuitable videos are for me personally. I am glad they exist for people who can learn better that way, knowledge transmission is knowledge transmission, it’s good that the creators made them to help people learn! But I’ll spend an hour searching for articles and failing to find any before I give in and turn to the video that was the first result.
Do you have any book recommendations?
I think The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas is a great book everyone should read every couple of years. It’s not really a lot of “low level coding tips” - more like overall paradigms
I myself don’t have any. Most of the books I studied with were in German. But I saw plenty in the library. And it depends on what you want. There are some on specific programming languages, or design patterns, or concepts like object oriented programming …