[learc83]

The problem is without learning the fundamentals, you don't know what you don't know.

I'm 29, I taught myself to program with no formal education and I've been doing it since I made games for my calculator in 8th grade.

However, I'm going back to school for a CS degree (I already had 90 hours of a history degree), and I constantly run into new stuff in my theory classes that would've saved me a lot of time on past projects.

Learning just the practical stuff that you need right now is fine if you just want to hack something together. But know that if you do it that way you'll have gaps in your knowledge that you didn't even know were there until they bite you in the ass.

[jasey]

While I agree with you I think its equally, and if not more important to have a broad high level knowledge of topics.

I taught myself recursion, threading, bit manipulation, design patterns etc as I needed them. I knew what problems they solved at a high level and only learnt the implementation when I needed to.

For example, I only knew about where you might use the decorator pattern before I had a programming test for a job which required you to "create a plugin system". A few hours learning how to actually apply it and I was good to go.

Also if you surround yourself with people smarter than you, you always have someone to point you in the right direction.

This is why I love HN, even though my background is engineering. I get a high level understanding on marketing, design, sales, hireing, product development etc etc

Its cliché, but "learning how to learn" is whats important to me.