Re: Impending Friardom

[dfaure]

Roughly speaking about my own (real) XP ;-), the only purely technical things I kept from academic CS are:

• Boolean algebra
• Algorithm design

and theses basic topics are quite well explained in books, FAQs,... This is just easier having a teacher helping you to push the stuff into your brain than sitting on the books and waiting for the knowledge coming thanks to capilarity action (I tried this way, but this doesn't work very well).

More seriously and IMHO, the key is more (pedantically speaking) a matter of methodology, which is not a CS dedicated topic. There's a lot books about the subject which applied to CS leads to practices like SADT, UML, MERISE, and more recently eXtreme Programming. There you'll find helpful being subscribed to a public/university library. Lot's of these books are interesting to read but not worth to have always at home.