in reply to Autodidact Followup

  1. What do you feel you are hampered or limited by, either artificially or legitimately.
    2. I have great fear about the unknown. Whenever I have an idea I worry that someone else has already had it and proven that it won't work. Consequently I spend a lot of time researching my field and try to convince myself that my ideas are good.
  2. Do you align yourself more with being an autodidact or non-autodidact.
    3. Autodidact without a doubt. I dropped out of college to work in the industry.
  3. How has that alignment effected you professionally.
    4. It is mixed. On the one hand I am (to use the new buzz word) agile when it comes to tools, methods, and ideas. On the other I don't have the benefit of the thousands of developers who went before me so I am likely to stumble into the same mistakes they made. Not having a degree has also hurt me since the market down turn. More and more places want a degree and are not willing to settle for experience.
  4. Did you at some point (semi)realign yourself for personal/financial improvement?
    5. I haven't had to yet, and I don't see having to in the future. I do plan on going back to college, but that won't (I hope) affect my nature.

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Re: Re: Autodidact Followup
by Silicon Cactus (Scribe) on Oct 08, 2002 at 20:38 UTC
    "On the one hand I am (to use the new buzz word) agile when it comes to tools, methods, and ideas. On the other I don't have the benefit of the thousands of developers who went before me so I am likely to stumble into the same mistakes they made."

    This is where being autodidact hurts me as well. I have taught myself (with the aid of folks when I get stuck) just about everything I know about CS. I do not have a problem learning new syntactic structures, new pragma, etc. What I find I miss out on is algorithms. One of the things I feel I missed out on by not going for that CS degree is algorithm design. Sure I can cobble things together, but they are usually slow/inefficent. I often goggle at some of the things that the better educated monks put together, and oftimes am so amazed at the solution I can barely begin to understand how/why it was done that way.

    This is where being self taught has hurt me. I can only learn up to a certain point of complexity, then the teacher begins to fail the student- because I do make mistakes and noone is there correct me.

    Well, that's the way it was until I stumbled onto this place. - Thank my lucky stars.
[reply]

      Well then that's easy to fix - start learning algorithms. I started with Knuth's TAoCP vol1 Fundamental Algorithms but that's too dense. I did rather like volumn 2 Sorting and Searching. From there I'm going through the Red Dragon book _Compilers__Tools,_Techniques_and_somethings_. In general if you need algorithms - just go learn it. The books are out there. I'm considering picking up an Addison-Wesley book on data mining next. My point here is that if you learn what the /good/ books are then just go learn from them.

      __SIG__
printf "You are here %08x\n", unpack "L!", unpack "P4", pack "L!", B::
+svref_2object(sub{})->OUTSIDE

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