After I dropped out of a theoretical physics Ph.D. program a long time ago, I decided to try to become a computer programmer. I had not taken a single computer science course in college. I was lucky that my parents allowed me to live at home for a year while I spent my entire time teaching myself programming. A friend told me to learn Scheme, so I went through all of SICP using my sister's Mac (I did not own a computer at the time). Then I started to learn C and Unix, hacked a bit with that, learned C++, and applied for jobs after doing some open source work so that I could have something to show. I got hired as a software engineer a year after I started my self-study.