self_taught_programmers_need_these_things.txt

Design Patterns: common "Template" solutions to regularly encountered problems/variations-on-that problem. Be careful when learning these that you don't fall victim to "when you have a hammer, everything is a nail". Also learn the Anti-patterns, wikipedia has a good list of anti-patterns.

Algorithms & Data Structures: Analysis, average running time Big O is most important, but understanding worst-case runtime is important too. Designing algorithms vs knowing when to leverage an existing one.

the C++ standard library provides a great many of these, it has a high efficiency sort (from ), it has good collection data structures (vectors, linked lists, maps, etc)

Objected Oriented Analysis And Design: Knowing when to make something an object, when and how to use inheritance and polymorphism, when to not make something an object. Plain old data objects. separation of responsibility: UI is not logic, logic is not UI.

Threading: proper thread synchronization techniques (mutexs, semaphores, conditions, etc), threading patterns such as Producer-Consumer, Inter-process communication

Automata & Computability: (Deterministic|Nondeterministic) Finite State Machines, Regular Languages, Turing Machines

Programming Languages: LL language parsing & rules authoring.

Computer Architecture: Processor design, pipelining, caching, function calling conventions, etc - how to use this knowledge to write more efficient programs