Course Planning

After some research and thought into the best course of study I've begun to sketch out the direction of my self-study. In keeping with the idea that the courses should start general and gradually move to more specific areas, I've outlined some general topics to begin with. These are not exactly the primers that university would begin with, but that's one of the benefits (and/or downfall) of choosing one's own path.

I would like to keep a fairly modular and flexible structure to my studies so I think that, for now, I will do three courses at a time. The first three I have decided on have been chosen for specific reasons to do with a well rounded education. Each course will be referenced by a tag in my subsequent blog posts.

Writing

Most technical degrees start with some humanities courses, and since I am blogging my education, it would be a service to myself and my readers to hone my writing skills.

I will be using the assignments from MIT OCW "Writing and the Environment" as the basis for this course. As the assignments will not be marked, it is essentially just practice but I will be watching the comments section, and if some kind readers would provide me with critiques, comments or suggestions, I will be forever grateful.

Programming

Again the starting point for most degrees of this kind is some general computer science course. Having a fairly good grasp of the basics, I have decided to go a bit different direction with my baseline programming course. I will be diving into programming with assembly language.

Assembly language is about as "bare metal" as you can get when it comes to programming and I think it will be a fruitful course in exposing the underlying architecture of computer systems. I plan to do a final project in this course, but I'm not quite sure what that will look like. My first steps will be to get through the assembly language text I already have and implement some of the algorithms that I have only done in higher level languages (python mainly).

Having identified documentation and notes as one of the possible downfalls of personal education, this blog will fulfill that role. Since google docs have enabled uploading of any file, I will publish all source code and notes from each project to this blog.

Certification

I haven't yet determined which certification to prepare for first, but I think that the CompTIA A+ is probably the best starting point. I would welcome any advice from people who have had experience with this as I'm into new territory on this one.