Learning all this is very important. There are people out there working on problems that are either solved, easily mappable to a solved problem, or proven impo

Learning all this is very important. There are people out there working on problems that are either solved, easily mappable to a solved problem, or proven impossible. Don't be one of those people. Don't be one of many to reinvent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming in a new problem domain. Don't learn http://pmbook.ce.cmu.edu/ http://pmbook.ce.cmu.edu/ the hard way.