It was at a magnet school, as were the C++ and OOP classes. The class was self-paced. I was the only student. We only had about fifteen three-hour lectures b

It was at a magnet school, as were the C++ and OOP classes. The class was self-paced. I was the only student. We only had about fifteen three-hour lectures before the prof basically said, "and that's all I got." Book was about 1k pages. Drained it. Totally forgot the title, but it was definitely a university text on MIPS and microarch. There was a class in OS's, data-structures, and probably some others that I could have taken instead. I had long been trading AMD and other tech stocks and naturally had a huge preference for anything hardware. Data Structures would have gotten me closer to writing meaningful programs faster. It's not clear that had I focused more on high-level programming, especially with scripting languages, that I would have had the willingness to approach lower-level tools and programming languages over the years. My time at the helm of scripting languages has made it very efficient to tool around with various highly abstract constructions in OOP, API writing, and also making money. My ongoing trip back into the low-level these days is what gets me excited. For the record, I highly recommend magnet schools. I highly recommend supporting increased education spending, founding companies that focus on better value for education, and especially projects like MOOC's that can offer more selection while bringing down geographic barriers. Offering only Fordist institutions from last century is inexcusable.