I have. All of my knowledge of theoretic CS comes from research papers. There's pretty much no such thing as computer science education in my region (Ukraine)

I have. All of my knowledge of theoretic CS comes from research papers. There's pretty much no such thing as computer science education in my region (Ukraine) -- no theory is covered whatsoever. Long story short, I'm studying physics instead. Anyway, my interest in programming eventually lead me to interest in Scheme and specifically, compiler construction. And the only source of information on this subject are research papers published online. So for the last five years I've read half of readscheme.org, and some papers from the home pages of various researchers. Topics include algorithms and data structures, various programming techniques, garbage collection, control flow analysis, and so on. I can attest that productivity of this method is low. It's hard to read about relations between CPS and Monadic style, while you don't know the definition of either. But eventually it comes to you; after a number of papers with lambda-calculus inside you can pretty much infer the notation. Another issue is that some large chunks of knowledge are missing; some topics are out of scope of these papers, some are considered to be common knowledge. And you often just don't know what have you missed; needless to say such education is fragmentary. On the other hand, over the years I've mostly lost interest in physics, but interest for CS is higher then ever; and I believe it's no coincidence. So there. While this is not the fastest way of learning, it certainly has advantages.