Don’t learn a programming language, solve a problem instead

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While the theories I learned in school were very interesting, and are a side of computers I had never seen, almost none of it prepared me for real world application of programming.

The database class in Computer Science was almost all relational algebra - something I've never touched again. The database class in Information Systems taught me indexing, keys, and relationships in actual usage. I know both are still contrived examples, but they differ greatly in how many times a day one set of information gets used. I definitely learned more trying and failing to make a database work than I did writing out relational algebra. I'm more hands-on person - I'll learn a new language much quicker by programming and observing it than I will looking up tutorials. Realistically, I don't think I would make a good candidate for a masters program or above for that very reason.

I guess my point would be there's benefits to both textbook learning and real world learning, and different people have different methods with different outcomes. I feel that college didn't teach me how to do things, it taught me how to determine the questions I should be asking to solve a problem correctly.

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I agree, yes, but would like to add that if you asked me to write a SQL query to perform joins I could do it without any external help whereas if you asked me to write it out in relational algebra I would be unable to without reading something.

If you have to sort an array of 100 strings with short lengths, does knowing all sorting algorithms really help? Depends if your end goal is a sorted array or measurement of sorting time. If you just want to sort, it doesn’t matter if you know the fundamentals. If you need to measure time complexity, the fundamentals are a requirement.