Comment by csnewb

The books that I've read that have helped me immensely: How To Solve It, Problem Solving 101, 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, and Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Trying to improve my problem solving ability in coding forced me to look inwards and analyze my thought process to understand why I'm able to solve some problems and unable to solve others. Ultimately I've realized the root cause of my inability to solve hard problems was poor problem decomposition. Every hard problem can be broken down into subproblems, and those can be further broken down until they become easy enough to solve. Then you just connect all the pieces together. It takes a lot of deliberate practice with many problem types to be able to recognize how to decompose problems, however.