I''ve written about this before but I''ll say it again...

Books - They are great learning tools. The main problem with learning from books is that you can goto any page and start reading. This ability gives the reader a level of freedom which they often take advantage of. "I don''t need to know how to write the hello world program, I''ll move directly into File I/O". For those people who actualy know the language and it''s theories this is great because the book is mearly a refrence. For those who are learning it often causes them to miss things that are more important then they realize. An Example of this would be moving onto linked lists after skipping the section on pointers. Which is why most books are ordered in a specific way. If the reader follows the book page by page chapter by chapter then things will work out alright. Typicaly book learning works very well for those of us who are Visual/Kenetic Learners.

Degree - Well a degree isn''t much different from a book. The courses are structured in a way that is supposed to teach you how to think. The benefits to a degree are as follows:

#1. You have an experianced (hopefuly) teacher who can answer your questions.

#2. Not only are you learning Visualy and Keneticly while in the lecture those who need audio que''s to learn also benefit.

#3. Your forced to do assignments that you would normaly consider "Stupid" and "useless". Which benefits you in the long run.

The downside is that the majority of tests are conducted on paper even for language classes such as C. I''ve never understood why this is done, it is more logical to place someone on a computer and say you have 15 min to make a program. Which leads to the major problem with degrees. Because so many university degree programs tests are conducted on paper there is very little actual programming time. Theory is what is enforced, and programming experiance is put out to pasture. So while you maybe able to code yourself a linked list, or Binary Search Tree, little things like syntax errors, and adding libraries to your project will throw you for a loop.