I went out for walk today and happened to listen to podcast about E-Book self publishing for the Kindle Unlimited program. This got me thinking about books I wish had been written, and an idea popped into my mind: “Computer Science for the Self Taught Programmer”. My undergraduate degree is in chemistry and I only was able to bring my programming skills up to a professional level through a whole lot of painstaking trial and error. I built dozens of silly software projects, read tons of programming books, and only later on realized I had a deficit of true computer science knowledge. To remedy this I worked my way through text books (Cormen’s Into to Algorithms) and Udemy courses on the subject matter.

I noticed a lot of software development interview books were essentially primers or refresher courses for this kind of basic algorithms and data-structures material, but there was still no book geared exclusively toward the self-taught. Most of the interview books don’t have a lot of depth into the concepts or are even geared toward teaching (just preparation for whiteboard questions), so these are not a great place to learn comp sci concepts.

Anyway, when I got home I googled the book title and found this:

https://leanpub.com/computer-science-for-self-taught-programmers/feedback

Well, it looks like he never wrote the book! So I am going to do it instead! It will be a very easy introduction and discussion of all of the common concepts and it should be a good primer for more in depth self study. I want to book to have a conversational tone and be full of practical example and analogies to help readers relate. I’ll make sure to update this post as I make my way through the process.