[mshron]

It may be too late for this to be seen, but there's another point I expected to see somewhere on here that should be said.

Read other people's code. Find small pieces of software that do the kind of thing you would want to do that are written by people you know are talented and see how all the parts fit together. Maybe there's one at your job, or a well-polished but small open source project.

Run it through a call graph generator. See what they encapsulated and what they didn't. Look at any unit tests, if they're there. Most of the real software that I've looked at is much more about knowing how to lay out logic than it is about particularly advanced algorithms.

Algorithms are certainly good to know, but there's a reason why computer science and software engineering have two different names.