[ghostdiver]

You must find a way to communicate that you have computer science knowledge in your resume or during interview. Someone will ask questions, which are supposed to be difficult for a "self taught" guy, you better know the answers, lack of formal education is not an excuse, it will only prove that you are lazy enough to read some books(or just wikipedia :P)

[franl]

Awesome point. Do you have any reading/strategy you'd suggest? One thing I'm doing is open courseware like CS50 from Harvard. Do you think that sort of work is worthwhile with regard to what you mentioned? Study algorithms? Do topcoder challenges? Project Euler? I'm open to whatever it takes :)

[ghostdiver]

Top Coder challenges may work for you, reading some books will help in solving problems(like Cormen Introduction to Algorithms). That may help only about "theory".

In case of learning the more technical terms, open source projects are the way to go, no need to be active committer, try to understand the workflow and language they use.

[franl]

Awesome man, thanks! I actually got Algorithms by Sedgewick and Wayne instead. The reviews on Cormen said it's the seminal resource on algorithms, but a little too advanced for the self-directed (non-genius) learner.