"Pro" takes experience and time, and in this profession given how things churn, unless you are specifically working with a static environment, sure "pro" versus someone else, but you need to be continually learning.
I created the list for underclassmen in my college to start learning technologies outside of school work, so a title like this will create incentive for them to start learning on their own. Many students here turned out to like the list so I decided to share it here as well.
Do I consider myself an expert, no. A pro? No.
Libraries, processors, application being built always expose challenges and things to be aware of.
This is why I take exception with the phrasing of "Pro" based off of a reading list.
Despite who my employer is, I know much more about the internals and libraries associated with BSD and Linux related programming in the language of "C" than I do Win. Where do I declare myself an expert? "stdlib"? "stdio"? And so forth.
I'm continually a student in the areas that pop up that interest me (and the ones I wish to maintain).
A good professional takes pride in his work, and aspires to improve his craft.
False modesty gets you nowhere.
That said, are you sure it's a good idea to remove modesty from your mind? It seems like more have fallen to pride than were lost to modesty.
Link to a cool TED-talk (20 hours): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY
:)
Reminds me of an amusing email I saw recently, where a recent grad, wanna be business analyst, was evaluating a vendor and declared after meeting some of their team that they were 'technically excellent'. Maybe they are, but how on earth that guy thought he was qualified to judge was beyond me.