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  • But waht are the basics? Assembly, binary code? Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 13:52
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    Whilst your general point of "know as much as you possibly can" is a sound one, I would question the idea that you will "NEVER be able to solve the really hard, strange, difficult and complicated problems that come your way" if you don't understand pointers. This somehow implies that all difficult problems can be solved using these "magic" pointers, which is not the case. The concepts between pointers are useful to know, but they are not directly essential to many fields of programming. Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 14:10
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    @Idsa: no, even more basic, many programmer's nowadays don't even know how transistors and logic gates works in the goo' ole' chips, and they surely should have known how electrons moves about and the effect of quantum uncertainty on miniaturization; I haven't even started on quacks, liptons, and bison! and the Hiccups bison particles! Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 15:34
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    Basics.... things like how stuff is stored. The difference between a byte, a word, how signed and unsigned work. How pointers work. What a character is. How things are coded in ASCII (and these days, Unicode). How a linked list can be created in memory using simple structures only. How strings REALLY work. From these little things, bigger things grow. Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 1:29
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    Know as much as you possibly can is a good principle, but I think you have the cart before the horse. Good developers strive to learn whatever they can because they're good developers. The yearning for knowledge is a trait of a good developer. It is not the cause of a good developer. Going out and learning as much as you can will not make you a good developer. It will make you a walking encyclopedia, nothing more. If you're a good developer, THEN you can APPLY that knowledge you attained to solve problems. But if you weren't already a good developer, the knowledge won't get you much. Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 18:01