Today, you don't even need to go to college to get access to all those fancy courses - thanks to MIT and Yale, you can now simply download and watch them at home:
If you are still in high school, or just want to know more about some subject, this is an ideal possibility to find out more - I listened to a bunch of lectures about Mathematics for my own paper.
Recently I discovered an interesting story on one of my favorite websites: [cached]Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
It contains just about every important idea mentioned in one of the posts in Less Wrong, while still being absorbing - maybe even more so than the original Harry Potter books.
Some years ago, I was fascinated by the inner workings of the games I played. I already had learned C++, so I set out to find out more about the libraries and techniques specific to graphics programming.
My journey began with [cached]NeHe, an excellent series of tutorials for OpenGL beginners. (The lessons are available in many languages, not just C++)
Next, I read up on engine design. Of course, ambitious as I was, I aimed for a fully scalable multi-threaded engine. Had I wanted to create an actual game, this would have led to endless frustration (as any game …