The road to become an alpha programmer

Sunday, 10 December 2006, w kategoriach: Programming

Update: Version 1.2, 07.05.07 - A lot of typos and grammar errors fixed, added new positions again, rewritten some of the descriptions.

Update: Version 1.1, 21.03.07 - I reorganized the whole thing and rewritten various parts of it, added some new positions, expanded the mind-map etc.

So, you wanna be a programmer, but you don’t have a fortune to spend to start learning in a decent college nor whole days for studying. Or maybe you’re too young to go to a college, but you wanna get an idea of what CS is about. Or you hate people because you’re a nerd, or you got a sucking score on the SATs, or you didn’t make it to the MIT like I didn’t, or whatever…

The good news is: I’m 100% sure one can get really, really good on your own at home - it needs a lot of dedication and effort, through. It’s much easier to just sit whole days and read posts on weblogs about how to get good at something than to really start studying hard (speaking from my own experience). I found that I already have so much stuff that I want to learn that I don’t need even more new inputs to overwhelm me, so I cut out a lot of programming related blogs from my feed reader. The article below is supposed to be a road-map primarily for myself, so feel free to make suggestions, but remember it isn’t meant to be objective, authoritative or complete.