| If you want to learn as fast as possible, I think it does. For me, my computer science program in college was finally a place to get answers and move on when I did encounter that one stumbling block. Even if I could learn 99% of whatever material I was interested in from reading things online, I'd inevitably spend at least that much time struggling with something I didn't get that really held me up. For example. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why, a computer program wouldn't know at compile time how much memory its data structures would use. So while I could read about malloc, I just didn't get the use case (as dumb as that sounds). As you can imagine, asking someone who knows what they're doing leads to a real quick "ah ha, of course" moment. This was in 2001 before stackoverflow existed, and it felt like I was living in a bubble. Maybe things are different today. If I were learning from scratch now, I'm sure I could have learned the answer to that question and much more on my own. But I have to think that I would have just entered college a little bit further, stuck on slightly harder questions. To say nothing of the things school made me do that I wouldn't have done on my own, like learn how a compiler works, or take a database course. Two things I feel are paying dividends to this day. |