Personally I’d recommend practice; I can’t comment on Morendil’s book recommendations, as I haven’t read those books, but now I’m thinking maybe I should.
I can’t really think of a way to simulate business requirements (Morendil is quite right − 99% of the time, the biggest problem is getting past the client’s own lack of understanding of their problem), but you could simulate the programming side of the equation.
Throw yourself into a technology you’ve never worked with before, and try to solve a problem that seems appropriate to it. Say, try to get a process to insert the contents of an Excel spreadsheet into an Access database using Apache POI feeding into ODBC drivers (provided you have no experience with either POI or ODBC) in a two hour timeframe.
Personally I’d recommend practice; I can’t comment on Morendil’s book recommendations, as I haven’t read those books, but now I’m thinking maybe I should.
I can’t really think of a way to simulate business requirements (Morendil is quite right − 99% of the time, the biggest problem is getting past the client’s own lack of understanding of their problem), but you could simulate the programming side of the equation.
Throw yourself into a technology you’ve never worked with before, and try to solve a problem that seems appropriate to it. Say, try to get a process to insert the contents of an Excel spreadsheet into an Access database using Apache POI feeding into ODBC drivers (provided you have no experience with either POI or ODBC) in a two hour timeframe.