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Did you guys learn all this stuff by yourself, or are most of you in college doing this?

I started programming when I was 10 or so. Self-taught from books I got out at the library. I took a class in High School, where I was teaching the teacher things. I took a course (still in high school) at the community college (PSEO student). Then I started my CSE program, and was introduced to some new languages, better instruction etc.

I have been a mix of traditionally educated and self-taught. I really believe that you can learn just about anything if you want to give it a go yourself.

Some of the best programmers were self taught, and some came from school. It is really more about the person I think that makes you a good programmer. The logical thinking is what you really need. Knowing the languages just comes after you figure out how to think about a problem.

This question seemed to want a poll, so I added one. Dance!

I'm the same way. If I need to learn something, I'll just go find a tutorial somewhere, but I still take courses to expand on what I already know

I thought it was "Six to one, half dozen to the other"?

I started programming in 2nd grade, so obviously I'm 99.999% self-taught. I am a CS major in University now, but (at least so far) I've learned nothing new in college. I'm just going to get the degree so I can go to grad school

That is a shame .. what year are you in?

I was programming from about 10, but I'd never dealt with any of the math or algorithmic analysis that I learned as an undergrad. Graphs, OOP, most data structures, formal language theory ... all new to me in university.

Started when I was 13 but stopped when I was 15. I took it up again in University and have been coding since. I'm a full-time software developer, now, so I took my degree to the field.

Same. I look back at all of my code and realized how vastly I've improved. I've learned so much more in University, not to mention the credibility to actually work as a programmer.

I'm dealing with larger problems, too which is nice. Maybe in the future, I'll jump out of software development for businesses and into something more lower level.

First year (so I'd expect to not learn anything). Though I'm set to graduate in 3 years, so I guess that puts me as a 1.3 year?

In 2004 I joined a bunch of programming forums, without most of the knowledge you mention. By the end of the year, with probably 3000 posts to the forums, a couple thousand pages of more advanced books, and a LOT more actual programming experience, I'd learned most of those topics.

Wow, I'm 16 and just starting to pick this up. Sounds like a LOT of hard work.

Also, what were some of those mentioned forums?

It IS a lot of hard work, which is what some of the engineers I see here at school struggle with. Engineering is a very stressful, difficult, time-consuming major. Computer science even more so.

I will guarantee you will do fine, though, as long as you're actually interested in all this stuff. If you WANT to learn it, you will.


I visit a lot of forums, but some good programming forums are:
http://www.cboard.cprogramming.com <--- really good
http://www.cpp-home.com/forum/index.php <--- used to be really good, don't know about now
This forum
And a couple others, but those should get you started really nicely

Good luck!

Taught myself in 8th grade, and have taken one course in high school, AP Computer Science. When I taught myself it was VB (which I am slightly ashamed of, but that's what I found first.) It's not that bad, it's just that once I learned true object oriented programming I couldn't go back to VB6. APCS taught me Java, although our teacher's mantra was "Google It" so he was giving us mostly the science part, algorithms and data structures and Big O stuff, and the rest we googled for ourselves. Now I'm working on learning C++/C so I can do some more fun things, because although Java is incredibly nice for learning it's too slow for serious stuff, my Visual Basic games were faster than my Java stuff. I'm also planning on learning to program my DS, I've made some simple Hello World type programs but never got much farther because documentation isn't as well developed as Java docs are. I think Java really spoiled me by being so well-laid out and libraried, when I found that C++ arrays don't have a .length property my reaction was pretty much wtf why??? Pointers are rather fun though.

So far all my programming knowledge I've taught myself; HTML, JavaScript, C++, and BASIC.

I'm working on my Associates Degree at Ivy Tech, and I will be taking some coding classes in the future...

I'm 13 and I taught myself earlier this year.