Invisible wrote:
> On the other hand, somebody taught in a classroom would have a complete 
> coverage of the subject, not just bits and pieces of it.

This counts for very little in modern programming, really.

Someone did an analysis a few years ago of "unix gurus", to figure out how 
they'd become gurus. The only commonality found was that they'd all learned 
where to efficiently look for the answers.

I'm currently using very little that has been in a textbook. Even 
programming languages these days are changing faster than books are written 
about them.

No college is going to teach you how to port Linux to an embedded system, or 
how to get hardware acceleration into Qt's drawing routines.

I remember only vaguely my ray-tracing class. If I wanted to write a 
ray-tracer, I'd have to sit down with books or web pages and figure out all 
the math again.  What I remember is the basics of how the process works, so 
I know what math I have to learn, for example.

> (I tell you, the number of times I've spent weeks working something out, 
> only to discover that there's some textbook somewhere with the exact 
> solution I was looking for already written down... If I had a thorough 
> knowledge of the subject, I'd have known the answer in the first place!)

No, what you need to do is practice learning where to find the answers. 
Unless you're the type that remembers all the details of everything you've 
learned. I used to be like that, I think, but it seems to have been going 
downhill over the years. :-(

>> Give it a couple of days, and if you don't hear anything, write back.  
> Don't have a way to do that.

Find a way. Of course they have an address, and a person works there.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Insanity is a small city on the western
   border of the State of Mind.

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