When I was doing CS we had a lecture course on Pi calculus with very extensive hand written notes, because it was a field still very much in development and the

When I was doing CS we had a lecture course on Pi calculus with very extensive hand written notes, because it was a field still very much in development and there was no textbook. I think there is a lot to be said for taking a degree which lends an element of structure not chosen by you. Sometimes you need to learn the stuff that doesn’t interest you to have a foundation to really understand the stuff that does, and you might find there are other things you had never been interested enough in to even consider which will turn out to be really interesting. On top of that I think tuition in small groups is much better than I’ve seen any meetup group manage. I’ve organized it once at a previous employer to help get some our application developers to the point where they could work on the our core vm and database, and I think they found it helpful being able to ask questions and talk over where exercises had given them trouble.