Ask HN: What if I missed the good stuff in my undergraduate education?

You clearly missed the point of your liberal arts education. How sad.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Slow down there, cowboy. Just because my education was deficient in one way doesn't mean it didn't make up for it in others. I'm incredibly thankful for my liberal arts education; it turned me into the happy hippy I am today. Do I have some frustrations and regrets in terms of the things I missed? Absolutely. But that in no way prevents me from appreciating the things I did learn, which were numerous and profound.

The most important thing I learned from university was learning how to learn. I'm a developer who majored in Electrical Engineering and the computer science related topics I'm picking up via courses here and there and lots of reading.

I don't know where you are but you could try taking courses over weekends as well if they offer them.

This is a great book, although before you get started with this one, I would recommend this other one for a quick hands-on intro to compilers and interpreters: "Writing Compilers and Interpreters: A Software Engineering Approach, 3rd Edition," by Ronald Mak. If you've never had much guidance on the subject, writing a compiler for "The Elements of computing systems" could take an unnecessarily long amount of time your first time. Mak's book is in Java, which might be a plus in your case.

"I remember taking the courses, but there was a huge amount of information that got shoved into my head and remained there just long enough to pass the exams and now it's gone."

I'm sure there's a more technical term for this, and to some extent this is my personal experience, but: In general, to learn something you need a "hook", some information "nearby" that you have mastered and the new thing you are learning is just an incremental step from. It is very easy in a school environment to be pushed along at what is a bad pace for you, miss one of the "hooks", and be screwed for the entire rest of the course.

However, as long as you didn't entirely disengage, you will probably find if you go back and cover the topic again yourself, you will end up learning it faster the second time around that you would if there was no first time around. I have found in my experience that literally just re-reading the chapters I had "covered" before and combining that with the subsequent years of experience in the field would suddenly make it go "click".

In fact, when learning a new skill or field of knowledge from a book, this is deliberately how I learn now; read as much of the book as I can possibly stand, then go back to the beginning and start over. It sounds like you're wasting your time, it is actually quite time-effective, though there's a bit of art to the "as much as I can possibly stand".

If you still have your books, try just re-reading. If you don't, get some textbooks and try again. You might be surprised.

I would not recommend actually trying to go back and re-take a course; it is very likely that that will be a waste of time vs. this plan, unless you were so utterly lost that you truly learned nothing in which case somebody was negligent for letting you pass at all. At the very least try this first; it doesn't even have to take that long.