What should I learn that I missed by not going to school?

Posted by BinaryMuse on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by BinaryMuse
Published on 2011-03-14T15:14:49Z Indexed on 2011/03/14 16:20 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 322

Filed under:

school

|

knowledge

I'm a software engineer at a local university, and I feel I'm able to competently do my job, but recently I've been interested in "filling in" the gaps in my knowledge. I suspect I would have learned some of this in school; for example, I don't have a lot of knowledge of sorting algorithms (something I feel is pretty common in college). So, what knowledge am I likely missing by not going to college that I could study on my own?

Bonus points for listing resources that might put me on the right track!

Some background: I've programmed in PHP, Java, and Ruby (more seriously in Java and Ruby than PHP); I have some experience with C/C++, though my workload doesn't really lend itself to those languages; I work mostly (recently) with the web, using frameworks such as CakePHP and Rails. I'm familiar with SQL (though probably not with some of the theory).

Note: The university I work for has no technical classes, so taking courses on the university's dime is a great idea but not possible for me. :)

© Programmers or respective owner

Related posts about school

Use SQL Result to Query second time and grab more results via php

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am grabbing a list of school names from a database. When the user clicks on the school name, i want the code to fetch 2-3 other attributes related to the school name that the user has clicked on. My code for the single school name list: $query = mysql_query("Select schoolname, product, username… >>> More
Geek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95

as seen on How to geek - Search for 'How to geek'
Last week we enjoyed looking at Windows 3.1 running in VMware Player on Windows 7. Today, let’s upgrade our 3.1 to 95, and get a look at how most of us remember Windows from the 90’s. In this demo, we’re running the first release of Windows 95 (version 4.00.950) in VMware Player 3.0 running… >>> More
Geek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95

as seen on How to geek - Search for 'How to geek'
Last week we enjoyed looking at Windows 3.1 running in VMware Player on Windows 7. Today, let’s upgrade our 3.1 to 95, and get a look at how most of us remember Windows from the 90’s. In this demo, we’re running the first release of Windows 95 (version 4.00.950) in VMware Player 3.0 running… >>> More
convert the output into an list

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Linq.Expressions; using System.Xml.XPath; using System.Xml.Linq; namespace SampleProgram1 { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { string xml = @"<people>… >>> More
Idea for a physics–computer science joint curriculum and textbook

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
(I apologize in advance if this question is off topic or too vague) I want to write (and have starting outlining) a physics textbook which assumes its reader is a competent computer programmer. Normal physics textbooks teach physical formulas and give problems that are solved with pen, paper and… >>> More

Related posts about knowledge

Emit Knowledge - social network for knowledge sharing

as seen on ASP.net Weblogs - Search for 'ASP.net Weblogs'
Emit Knowledge, as the words refer - it's a social network for emitting / sharing knowledge from users by users. Those who can benefit the most out of this network is perhaps all of YOU who have something to share with others and contribute to the knowledge world. I've been closely communicating… >>> More
Building a StackOverflow inspired Knowledge Exchange Three Tiers to MVC – Hooray – Dependency Inject

as seen on Dot net Slackers - Search for 'Dot net Slackers'
In this article we will address the lack of testability that our current application has. We will do this by making our application conform to the dependency injection pattern. This will allow us to push up all of our dependencies which makes our code considerably more testable than it currently is. >>> More
Building a StackOverflow inspired Knowledge Exchange Three Tiers to MVC – Distributed systems: addin

as seen on Dot net Slackers - Search for 'Dot net Slackers'
In this article we are going to look at how distributable our current code base is. We will find that even with all the refactoring and modifications that we have done we are still pretty married to a fairly hardwired infrastructure. If one piece of our code requires more resources than any other… >>> More
Building a StackOverflow inspired Knowledge Exchange Three Tiers to MVC – Hooray – Inversion of Cont

as seen on Dot net Slackers - Search for 'Dot net Slackers'
In this article we will discuss how we can enhance the power of the Dependency Injection pattern by implementing an Inversion of Control container. We will discuss what an IoC container can be used for and how it works. Then we will look at implementing an Inversion of Control container in our code… >>> More
Storage Energy Efficiency: Knowledge Is Power

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
When it comes to storage and data center energy costs, users aren't getting enough information, according to a recent report. >>> More