The Self-Taught Computer Scientist

18Next Steps

For most people on Earth, the digital revolution hasn’t even started yet. Within the next 10 years, all that will change. Let’s get the whole world coding!

Eric Schmidt

Nice work! You made it through all the technical parts of this book. Your hard work is paying off, and you are well on your path to becoming a software engineer. I want to thank you for choosing to read my book and being part of the self-taught community. I can’t believe how big our community has become. It has been terrific getting the chance to meet so many inspiring people, and I cannot wait to read your success story next. In this final chapter, I will cover what you should do moving forward and provide some resources that might help you.

What’s Next?

First, let’s take a second to celebrate how far you’ve come as a self-taught programmer. You not only know how to program, you also understand many fundamental computer science concepts. You know how to write algorithms to solve various problems, and you can look at two algorithms and quickly decide which one you want to use. You can write recursive algorithms to elegantly solve problems and search and sort data in various ways. You are familiar with a variety of data structures, and you don’t just know what they are: you know when to use them as well. Overall, you’ve become a much more knowledgeable programmer with so many new tools in your toolkit.

Not only have you significantly increased your programming knowledge, with a little bit of ...