>>38
You can't really learn practical programming from books. Even courses on software engineering can't give you an education equivalent to experience. The widely lauded "design patterns" that they teach in those courses are really just that - patterns. They're patterns in solutions to problems that people who have written lots of code see over and over again. You won't appreciate or understand how to apply them until you've seen the problems yourself.
On the other hand, if you take an advanced computer graphics course at your school that's project based, I guarantee that either you will come out knowing how to program well enough, or you'll fail the course.
It would be cool if this board actually became a source of real help for this kind of thing rather than just a huge flame war.