And not to mention shared-memory parallelism. Multicore anyone? Ever heard of it? Going the 10-books-will-do-route will also make sure that you won't get expos

And not to mention shared-memory parallelism. Multicore anyone? Ever heard of it? Going the 10-books-will-do-route will also make sure that you won't get exposed to specialized fields such as embedded and real-time systems, machine learning, computational geometry, bio informatics, etc. A degree is also about knowing that certain fields exist; you don't necessarily need to have studied everything. You can read up on them when you need specialized knowledge, but if you've never heard of some obscure field because your "ten books" didn't mention it, then you are screwed. At a good university you will be exposed to a much wider variety of topics than any (reasonably sized) set of books will do.