Essential Copying and Pasting from Stack Overflow (opens in new tab)

That, or if you really have to use more, have a standard comment to mark such occasions so you can come back later and understand/fix it.

  // voodoo magic from stackoverflow starts here (link: ...)

The trick to copying and pasting is doing it when it won't be you paying back the debt.

Just like how the US economy works.

Even just retyping the exact code helps me quite a bit.

Good idea.

I closed my browser for 5 minutes and then wrote down what I remembered. I've printed out these pages and put them in a splendid ring binder. The hardback edition therefore takes pride of place on my shelf, and by the logic of the authors I wrote it myself.

You can copy the image, paste it into Word and print it.

Not everyone is like you. There are devs who use the internet to understand things, and when they see some code on the web they use that as a template to help with their particular problem. There are other devs who barely deserve the name, who struggle with everything they run up against and who blindly copy/paste code without an understanding of how it works or what it means in an effort to get the problem to go away. And of course there are folks of varying levels of talent in between.

Yes, it is a bit of a smug joke, and a bit of self-deprecatory humor as well. Since plenty of people leverage the expertise of folks on stack overflow and are still effective devs in their own right. But it feels like you would be shocked by the notion that a significant number of professional developers would struggle with, say, the fizzbuzz problem. But everything I've ever seen indicates that there is a huge class of developers who earn decent wages doing coding for a living at lots of places who nevertheless struggle with coding at a basic level.

I've certainly seen great slabs of code that have clearly been copied from somewhere, perhaps not Stackoverflow.

Unless there is some type of reference, you have no idea of what is going on or why...

joke image -> joke book. It's 4 pages (not to knock the content, I haven't actually read it. The author does say " The book is written in a deadpan manner.")

It's the only book I've ever written.