Conery Rob. The Imposter's Handbook

Second Edition. — Big Machine, Inc., 2021. — 964 p. — ISBN 978-0-692-93303-9.A CS Primer for self-taught developers.Dive into the fascinating, wonderful world of Computer Science.I spent years teaching myself the subjects that go into a Computer Science degree. I looked at the curriculum for Stanford and MIT (and a few others) and dove in.Computation, Complexity Theory, Cryptography, Algorithms and Data Structures, Lambda Calculus and more. I wrote it down and decided to share it all.Instead of a wall of theoretical text, I did my best to make them as human as possible, with hand-drawn sketches of complex topics that took me days (and sometimes months) to figure out. I wanted to write a technical book for humans that would convey the magic of our industry.Hey, I don't have one either and I always managed to get the job done anyway... then again... This industry changes so quickly - frameworks come and go as do idealogies and "best practices" for a given language or framework. How could anyone claim they knew "the best way"? We're all figuring this out right now was what I always believed. Turns out I didn't know what I didn't know.None of it mattered anyway - I had a job to do! And I did that job and my clients were happy. I created open source libraries, helped people and I even got a job at Microsoft - all the time believing I could learn what I needed to learn to get the job done.If only I could have understood how much more there was to know...I go to conferences every year and I meet some incredibly talented people and one year I sat in a room with a small group of attendees and speakers and the topic of Big-O came up. I just sat and listened. I had absolutely no idea what it was they were going on about...The discussion got animated. Someone mentioned graphs, another said something about Bin Packing and depth-first traversal of an optimization problem...I had been doing this stuff for over 15 years - how was it possible I had absolute NO IDEA what they were talking about.This had to change. I needed to change this for myself.
So I did.You'll get the core concepts and skills that every developer in our industry should know. At the end you will be a better programmer, understanding problems at a deeper level and (most importantly) understanding what you shouldn't be trying to do... and why!