If I was to go and search for ”God” on wikipedia would that mean I have understood the whole idea and ideal of God ? That is just silly. Philosophers and scholars have been trying to come up with that answer for thousands of years.
You couldn’t possibly be an expert by reading every single wiki article on the NET and these articles are constantly changing.
To be a expert one must do extensive studying (years) and real hands on experience.

@ Henk …

”First, you’ll have to establish your own order of learning stuff – if you learn about, say, polymorphism before you learn the basics of OO programming, you won’t get it and, more importantly, be discouraged”

Object Oriented is not always the preferred first choice in my experience. Why ? It handles a lot of different styles of coding, which can leave a newbie first time confused, especially if they’re new to computers in general.
OOP is only recommended for Coders who need to build, manage, structure big projects.
First one, learns the key basics, syntax wise and parameters.
All programming languages are based on a similiar syntax just different styles and procedures
First language I recommend is [Procedural programming] ”Pascal” or standard ”C” Which focus’s a bit more on the algorithms and data structures.

Regards,
Simple

let’s say you took this curriculum, or created a curriculum comparable to the material at a prominent university for the subject (obviously you would have to control for self practice by some means or measure in the variable set to balance the labs, assignments, etc). then have these folks take the certification/bar/board/etc. that college grads would take and see who’s scores end up higher.

on a completely separate note, not to say self-taught is by definition a different kind of thinker, but the need for a creative talent becomes more favorable when you account for the risk to be outsourced. another consideration- how many classes would you never have taken that later provided more breadth and depth that you never would have recognized prior?

great page, great debate, thanks!