Resources for self-taught developers

Books I recommend

• A Philosophy of Software Design, John Ousterhout
• The Pragmatic Programmer, David Thomas and Andrew Hunt

Stuff you should self-study

• Von Neumann architecture
• Latency numbers every programmer should know
• OSI network layers
  • Application: HTTP, SSL/TLS, DNS, FTP
  • Presentation
  • Session
  • Transport: TCP, UDP
  • Network: IP
  • Link: MAC
  • Physical
• Math and CS theory
  • Boolean algebra, set theory
  • Binary numbers, bitwise operations, base-2, base-10, base-n number systems
  • Church-Turing thesis
  • Lossy vs. lossless compression
• A general sense of the orders of magnitude and SI units.
• Cryptography
  • What is a hash? What is a hash collision?
  • How are passwords stored? What is a brute force attack? What is a rainbow table attack? What is a salted hash?
  • Symmetric vs. asymmetric encryption
• Operating system principles
  • Bootloaders, BIOS, UEFI
  • What is a kernel? What is a shell?
  • What are processes and threads?
• Creating applications
  • Programs vs. markup
  • Interpreted vs. compiled languages
  • Synchronous and asynchronous programming
  • APIs as a broad concept
  • HTTP and REST
    • Methods, headers, Content-Type
    • Securing API endpoints
      • Tokens vs. API keys
      • CORS, CSRF/XSRF