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Comment by slinger | Hacker News Reader

Awesome story! I'm interested in hear more about the time you spent learning non-programming fundamentals. Would you care to elaborate?

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I'd say non-programming fundamentals took about two months at about 4-6 hours a day, with the majority of that dedicated to algorithms and data structures.

I took these two OCW courses: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

And worked my way through these two books: https://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skiena...

https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Robert-Sedgewick-ebook/dp/...

I wrote out my solutions on a whiteboard or pen and paper before typing them into a computer.

Outside of A & DS, I spent some time on operating systems and networking in general. A little bit of probability, but no hardcore discrete math.

There are swaths of areas which I now cover at a slower pace as time allows; compilers, AI, etc.

What makes you categorize algorithms as non-programming? Isn't it like saying rhythm and melody are non-musical concepts?

Not OP, but maybe "coding" is a better term: they are language-agnostic fundamentals that don't change as quickly as the tools and frameworks we use daily as "programmers"

Thank you for your reply. I'm currently studying CS fundamentals as well. I'm taking an excellent operating system class from https://www.ops-class.org and I recommend to everyone that wants to learn this stuff.

just to confirm, you completed BOTH MIT algorithm courses and BOTH algorithm books, in the span of 2-months, including completing all the exercises/algorithms?

that seems like an incredibly short amount of time given the content. But if true, congrats! and please let me know your secret!

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