My problem is I have no formal schooling in programming, unless you count basic, and pascal (circa 1988). I guess I'll have to continue learning as I've done in the past, from books and personal experience.

I minored in computer science, and I actually had a class called Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis, but 99% of my understanding of computer programming in general and data structures in particular is stuff I've learned since I graduated, from programming that I've done. I don't remember covering hash tables in that class, much less higher-level structures based on them. I do remember covering linked lists, binary trees, general trees, and directed graphs, most of which I've never needed to use since, because the languages I use have higher-level structures and built-ins that make them unnecessary most of the time.

In Perl, for instance, linked lists are generally unnecessary because Perl's native list-handling is pretty good and its arrays are dynamically sized; binary trees are mostly unnecessary because hashes have even better performance metrics for lookup; directed graphs I've never used simply because I've never worked on the type of problem they're usually used to solve. (General trees I _have_ used, especially in the form of HTML::Tree and XML::Twig. I've yet to implement one myself, though.)

Don't get me wrong, the class was useful and worthwhile. But I've learned more about programming from other sources -- from books (if you haven't read Programming Perl, do so), from other people on the internet (Perlmonks is a fantastic resource), and most especially from actually doing stuff with Perl.

Actually, there's one thing that minoring in computer science did for me that I consider more valuable than everything else: I had to take classes in, and thus be exposed to, a number of different languages, in different language categories. Inside of three years I had COBOL, ForTran, Pascal, C++, Lingo, 8086 Assembler, and QBasic. I haven't used any of those languages recently, but being exposed to a number of _different_ languages was invaluable. If I were constructing the curriculum today, I'd require language classes in some form of BASIC, something from the Lisp family (probably Emacs Lisp, because some of its data structures (notably buffers, markers, and string properties) are fantastically well suited to its problem domain), either C or assembly (doesn't matter which; student chooses), Javascript, Inform (or maybe Smalltalk), Perl, SQL, and XML, and I'd probably specify that Perl is to be used in the data structures course. (We used QBasic. Yes, you _can_ create all those data structures in QBasic. Out of arrays. It's not efficient, but it works well enough to demonstrate the concepts.) Anyway, my point is that learning a number of different languages helps you to learn different ways of thinking about programming, different types of approaches. It makes you a better programmer, whatever language you end up using.