I'm still getting a lot of email about the "learn computer science at home for kicks" post that I put up a couple weeks ago.

Rather than responding to each email individually, a task which would require temporal resources that I simply do not have, and also because I'm guessing that for each person who responded there might be five more who wanted to but didn't, I'm going to summarize the most useful stuff that I've gotten to date from people.

Basically, if you're like me, then you don't even know where to begin with this stuff. A common theme among people who responded and wanted to be my tutor was this question: "What are your goals?"

It's strange how such a simple question can totally derail your simple plans to acquire a four-year computer science education in six months. The more I saw this question, the more I realized how absolutely little I knew about computer science.

So, here's what I'm going to do about it:

1) For the general overview of computer science, and so that I can get enough of a foundation to be able to answer the "What are your goals?" question, I'm going to pick up a copy of the book "Computer Science: an overview." It was recommended by a CS-prof friend of Mr. Sells named Joe Hummel. I had seen the book before, but I thought it looked too trendy to be useful. I was immediately suspicious of its elegance. But, if the heavyweights say to start there, then I'll start there. That's all right for me, though, as I like my computer science books the way I like my women: Hot tartlets with good fashion sense.

2) For getting a better understanding of the box itself, I'm dusting off assembly language skills that I haven't used in over ten years. I'm starting over with a copy of MASM (Borland TASM was my favorite "back in the day," but I'll take what I can get) and some tutorials. If there's anything that will remind me of how the gollywots of my computer are laid out, it's this slow, tortuous nightmare of a language (with which, I'll say, I had a helluva lot of fun in my youth).

That's it for now. The schedule's getting more and more packed everyday, so there's only so much I can do at any given time. Between the book and the assembly, I think I'll have a decent exchange going on between the theoretical and applied aspects of what I'd like to learn.

And, by this time next year, I'd like to be designing missile defense systems for the lowest bidder.

That's my goal, and with some assembly, an introduction to computer science, and a few white lies, I think I can get there.