Social Meejah in potentially interesting outcome shocker.

[hirez]

A question on the Faceache about hackery started me wondering about what I've managed to miss by not having, er, any CS qualifications.

On the other hand, I do have a pile of Useful Books - K&R (pre-ANSI), K&R (post-ANSI), Cheswick & Bellovin, the Lions book, Stevens (Advanced programming), the Pickaxe book, Zaks/6502, various O'Reillys and, er, Reliable data-structures in C. (It was the 80s. That sort of thing was allowed.)

However, I think I'm missing one or more about proper Rubyish object-orienteering. Maybe I should re-read the Pickaxe book.

Comments

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

When I told a friend of mine that I was no coder, she commented that she felt that was much easier if you had a background starting at uni (my uni degree is in psychology, hers in Hard Sums that mutated into CS-ish type things). I think it's probably the one area of IT where it really helps to have the solid grounding in the basics that a uni course with homework and tutoring etc could give you.

Which isn't to say you can't learn it now on your own, but that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it ;)

[reddragdiva]

Clearly having no better use whatsoever for my time, I'm reading through Stroustrup on C++ and feeling an ache in the mathematical muscles I haven't felt in 25 years.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Conversely, something like Varnish works as well as it does because it ignores all the CS best-practice and pays close attention to the way the hardware actually works.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

Esteemed colleagues who do more code-wrangling than I are all about the Seven languages (http://pragprog.com/book/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks) book from the Prags.

In my copious spare time etc etc...