>I love George Tasker's tagline.
>
>(paraphased, hope you don't mind George!)
>
>Art - Defined as an occupation requiring knowledge or skill, Art is order out of Chaos, therefore programming is an art.

I like your's too. Don't mind at all being paraphrased (I just hope that Richard Farina's estate doesn't mind the quote from "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me"). Especially since it gives me the perfect opportunity to shoot my mouth off.

One thing that you can't necessarily get anywhere else other than through a college course, is a chance to interact and pick the brains of a professor or other person who really has some incredible insight into how these things are supposed to work.

While at Kennesaw State in here Georgia, I had the good fortune to take two courses from Dr. Morris L. Roberts. He was the co-author of the book that was used in the "Programming Principles" series of classes. While I learned a great deal from Dr. Roberts, there was another individual who made an even greater impression.

My first course in this series was taught by one David Morgan, Ph.D. Dave is known to his students affectionately as "Crazy Dave". (Perhaps that's why he made such an impression on me < g >). Even to this day 11 years later, something that he said or did comes back to me, normally followed by, "That's what he was getting at!"

Dave started out the first course by having us define things over and over again. You'd probably be surprised that a blackboard could fit the eventual definition of what a computer is. Most of us who hadn't had one of Dave's courses before quickly came to believe that we understood why people called him "Crazy Dave". However, later the "method to his madness" became readily apparent. In fact, my previous signature was a tribute to what Dave had taught me:

"I hate definitions." - Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and numerous students failing computer science.

In reality there were two edges to what he was trying to get across. First, computers themselves only exist because of the recursive definition of the state of a bit. Bits define nybbles, which then define bytes, etc. The second point was that the problem solving aspect of programming is best accomplished by the definition and re-definition of the problem until each discrete piece become readily available.

Books and the rest of the materials and conferences are good. In my mind, however, they couldn't begin to replace the insight that I got from that course from "Crazy Dave".