The CS degree you never got

Sound familiar?

I know the feeling. I once brought down a system because I didn’t know what a file handle was.

Imposter syndrome is caused by not knowing what you don’t know. The ground feels unsteady because there are so many unknowns lurking beneath it.

I spent five years reading textbooks and watching lectures to fill my knowledge gaps. Then I spent two years condensing everything into…

What’s inside

Modern Operating Systems is 1,136 pages long. Database Systems: The Complete Book is 1,140. TCP Illustrated is 1,060 (just the first volume!). This single volume can never match such textbooks in depth or comprehensiveness.

Instead, I’ve focused on topics and concepts that I’ve encountered in my programming career. These are things I know are important. Ten concise chapters covering:

• Theory of computation – what’s computable and what’s not
• Algorithms and data structures – the building blocks of efficient code
• Computer architecture – how computers actually work
• Operating systems – processes, memory, and file systems
• Networking – how data flows across the internet
• Concurrent programming – threads, locks, and parallel processing
• Distributed systems – building scalable, reliable applications
• Programming languages – how languages work and differ
• Databases – storage, indexing, and queries
• Compilers – from source code to execution

Each chapter is a focused introduction and a launch pad for further study. These are the topics you’ll encounter every single day as a programmer.