
Book recommendation to learn basics of Comp Sci? - Andrenid
I&#x27;m a mid 30s web dev (LAMP stack), self taught, made a decent career from it for the last 10 years but now I&#x27;m keen to actually learn programming properly, with the aim to actually learning a &#x27;real&#x27; language later.<p>What&#x27;s the best books to read to give an introduction to computer science? Assuming zero background, no college&#x2F;uni education, etc. Sure I don&#x27;t exactly have zero experience but I&#x27;d like to approach it like I did, and learn it all from scratch.
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J-dawg
I'm also self taught, but just starting out. I'd be very interested to hear
about how you got started, got your first job, and ended up making a decent
career (if you don't mind sharing).

Do you feel like not studying CS has ever held you back? Whenever I'm
struggling to understand something I always wonder if a grasp of basic CS
concepts would have helped.

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Andrenid
I'd rather not divulge too much as far as details/places/companies, but the
basics of my career is something like this:

\- Played around with making websites from the very early days of the web
(gray backgrounds, black text, blue/purple links, <hr>'s everywhere, that
kinda thing).. mostly personal projects and small sites for friends/family.
Did this for many years, until discovering dynamic content via CGI scripts.

\- Got obsessed with CMSes.. Red Dot, PHP-Nuke, rolling my own CGI scripts,
DHTML, then PHP etc. Small hobby turned into obsession.

\- In the mid/late 90s I started doing freelance websites for local
businesses. Family contacts, local shops, etc.

\- Mid 2000s quite my retail management career and started a small business
with a friend, still just doing websites for local shops, friends of friends.

\- Did a few contracts for larger companies (TelCos, local Gov't), fixing up
their websites or installing CMSes (WordPress, Drupal, SharePoint).

\- One of those Gov't contracts was a 3 mth contract to redesign and rebuild
their website from scratch (static HTML site to a large Drupal multi-server
deal), they really liked me, hired me full time for more money than I'd ever
made in my life, to manage the website and build a decent sized web team,
which I've done ever since.

Everything I learned was from books, IRC and Google (.. and before that,
AltaVista, Compuserve, etc). I've never done any courses or education past
dropping out of high school. I just live, breathe, sweat and crap Web.
Subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds and blogs, have 100-odd books, etc.

I don't think not knowing CS ever held me back, but I definitely hit problems
I couldn't solve without that knowledge (Sorting/searching data, the maths
side of JS, etc).. I've just been lucky enough to know some really REALLY good
programmers to trade help for beer, when it comes to those problems. Those
friends have shown me how amazing CS is beyond web stuff, and for a decade now
I've been meaning to learn to do "proper" programming and kept putting it off.

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captaincrunch
The Art of Computer Programming
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321751043](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321751043)

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hackerboos
A poor recommendation for a beginner. Dense and frankly boring.

Start with Code by Charles Petzold.

[https://www.reddit.com/comments/ch0wt/a_reading_list_for_the...](https://www.reddit.com/comments/ch0wt/a_reading_list_for_the_selftaught_computer/)

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Andrenid
Thanks!

