I am a self-taught programmer and I do do not have any degrees. I started pretty young and I've got about 7 years of actual programming work experience. I believe I'm a pretty good programmer, but I admit that I have not played much with algorithms or delved into any really low-level aspects of programming such as how compilers work. I have worked with other programmers with and without degrees. Some were good and some not; having a degree didn't seem to make any difference as to which pot they fell into. Since then I've come to realize that it does depend on the school where the degree is obtained. Some people suggest that you really should get a degree; that there are things you'll learn in the process that you won't learn in the real world. Of course there is personal growth and discipline learned from completing a task of that magnitude, but let's just concentrate on the technical knowledge. What would I have been taught in a GOOD CS course that would aid me today and what can I read to fill the gap? I've heard the book "Algorithms" mentioned and I plan on reading that. What other books would you recommend? Edit: Clarification on 'actual work experience': Have worked for 2 small companies on teams with fewer than 5 people. About 2 years experience with Perl, Python, PHP, C, C++. About 5 years experience in Java, Applets, RMI, T-SQL, PL/SQL, VB6. 7 years experience in HTML, Javascript, bash, SQL. Most recently in Java designed and helped build an N-tier Java app with web frontend and RMI.