Definitely this! I'm passionate about becoming a great hacker and I'm regularly trying to improve my skills in both hardware and software hacking (20/80 split

Definitely this! I'm passionate about becoming a great hacker and I'm regularly trying to improve my skills in both hardware and software hacking (20/80 split at the moment). My main issue is that I require a lot of structure in terms of the way that I learn, to deal with this I've borrowed "Programming Interview Explained" [ http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secrets-Landing/dp/0471383562 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secrets... ] from a friend. It's a fairly short book but outlines what knowledge would be requisite for getting a job at Microsoft back in the early 2000s. I'm going through the book and finding out what knowledge areas are currently lacking and supplementing them with books which are considered to be good for that specific subset of computing. E.g. I found out I was terrible at bit manipulation, so I've bought "Hacker's Delight" [ http://www.hackersdelight.org/ http://www.hackersdelight.org/ ], which is helping in both my software knowledge and hardware knowledge. I figure that this method of learning will likely take me over a year if I limit the supplementing books to just 1 or 2 at most. After that I can go through it again, covering all of the topics that I thought I knew well enough to make sure my knowledge is all up to scratch. TL;DR Persistance is key if you want to gain domain knowledge in your field. I'm taking a backwards approach and using a book to define my learning path.