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Years ago I saw someone who was starting out in a specialist forum lament that everyone else on the forum was so much further ahead than they were. A user pointed out that the type of people who spend a lot of time on specialist forums are going to be among those most dedicated to the field, and just by visiting the forum and trying to improve themselves in that domain the individual was probably better than the vast majority of the people working in that domain.

If you’re goal is to have the same amount of CS knowledge as the average person with a CS degree who’s a few years out of college, it probably wouldn’t take that much time. Extremely few - I’d say almost none - CS graduates have gone through the entirety of SICP. You can read the other comment where someone said they went through it after getting a degree in computer engineering, and a lot of the concepts in it being new to them.

How long will this take? If you’re focused on learning as much as you can, it’s a never ending journey. But you probably won’t find a use for most of the knowledge (more and more so as you go along), so it’s going to be a hobby for the most part. If you’re just trying to cover the topics that people say you need to know (IE, the site gives understanding recursion as a reason to go through SICP), I imagine you could learn most of them surprisingly quickly.



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