SICP

My junior year at KU, I happened to take a little course called "Programming Language Paradigms" (EECS 662). Professor Brown has taught this course pretty much forever, and I think it's the only thing he teaches to undergrads (although he might pitch in on EECS 368, since that seems to round robin pretty quickly). Dr. Brown is an interesting character (very much the absent-minded professor), but the course was very eye-opening for me. I didn't realize it right away, but this was exactly what I had pictured my Computer Science education being. This specific class was it.

Later I found out why. The book on which Dr. Brown based the course is called Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which happens to be the introductory programming text written and used by professors at MIT. You know, that school that invented Lisp, arguably the most powerful language in use to date.

I still have this book, and have seriously been considering giving it a run through for a couple of hours each morning this summer. Today I found out that there are video lectures available to go along with each chapter in the book. You can download them (torrents even) here: SICP Lectures.

If any of you feel like becoming a thoroughly adept programmer, this is the book that will do it. The book itself is quite entertaining (filled with jokes and written in a very conversational style), but now with video lectures, it is basically an entire class. (The online version of the book is free, and available at the same link as the video.) Save yourself $25k on a B.S. in Computer Science and just spend time on this instead. It's worth it.