I didn't mean to be cruel. Self-Doubt is most likely going to be the driving force for him to get through the fancy stuff on his own. However I want to be know

I didn't mean to be cruel. Self-Doubt is most likely going to be the driving force for him to get through the fancy stuff on his own. However I want to be known learning to program != cs. Being confident in your own knowledge can often stops you from learning more. I often doubt my own knowledge, I often feel worried if I meet someone else because they expose me for the fraud I am. This keeps up the knowledge hunger. I was young hackery type when I was a kid(I wasn't particularly academic either), trying various programming languages(C, Scheme, Haskell), building games(Even 3d), exploiting software with buffer overflows, maybe some malicious hacking(I was curious) and generally exploring computing. This made me over confident in my ability. Then the academic community completely showed me up, they showed me how little I know in terms of theoretical cs. Destroyed my confidence. They don't even respect the skills I had, they're not academic skills. This made me doubt myself, and to catch up on the academic side of cs. This taught me the lesson of being overconfident. Actually changed my attitude to approaching other computer guys too from "I'm the best", to "this guy might know more than me". This made me impulse buy copies of don knuths books =P. My math skills also received a serious boost when I realised that was needed too.