Hello everybody,

I am looking into improving my programming skils (actually I try to do my best to suck less each year, as our Jeff Atwood put it), so I was thinking into reading stuff about metaprogramming and self explanatory code.

I am looking for something like an idiot's guide to this (free books for download, online resources). Also I want more than your average wiki page and also something language agnostic or preferably with Java examples.

Do you know of such resources that will allow to efficiently put all of it into practice (I know experience has a lot to say in all of this but i kind of want to build experience avoiding the flow bad decisions - experience - good decisions)?

EDIT:

Something of the likes of this example from the Pragmatic Programmer:

...implement a mini-language to control a simple drawing package... The language consists of single-letter commands. Some commands are followed by a single number. For example, the following input would draw a rectangle:

P 2 # select pen 2
D # pen down
W 2 # draw west 2cm
N 1 # then north 1
E 2 # then east 2
S 1 # then back south
U # pen up

Thank you!