Yes and no. In a vacuum, I think the more you know about CS the better--for instance, if you want to be a "full-stack"[0] programmer, reading a bunch of Rails t

Yes and no. In a vacuum, I think the more you know about CS the better--for instance, if you want to be a "full-stack"[0] programmer, reading a bunch of Rails tutorials won't be enough. Unfortunately, studying CS for three months probably won't help much either. It's kind of a dumb analogy, but I think learning how to do "pedestrian" programming is a bit like learning to translate a Chinese newspaper. There are broadly speaking two main algorithms: (1) read until you get stuck, ask for help, and then repeat until finished; (2) go study Mandarin in college for four years, and then translate the newspaper. If you need to translate the newspaper by tomorrow, then yeah, do (1). If you think you'll need to translate a ton of newspapers and have the luxury to study for a while, the second method might yield better results in the long run. [0] http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-full-stack-part-i/461505383919 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-full-...