A couple weeks ago, Scott Mitchell asked “how do you find your technical information?”. My short answer was: book reference -> MSDN documentation -> MSDN online -> .NET newsgroups. Just days later I stumbled upon Scott's data structures article series, and they were exactly the type of information I like to read. Theory first, helpful visuals (no screen shots), references to other articles, and simply a pleasant read. Bravo!
My guess is that 1/2 of the programmers creating solutions with Microsoft technologies don't have a CS degree (myself included). Likewise, their reading is primarily focused on “how” rather than the “why”. How do I bind a DataSet to something, how do I make a Web Service, essentially “how do I solve my current problem?“. There's nothing wrong with this approach, but it does tend to attach a solution to a problem, so in the future when problem x appears, previous solution y is applied without much thought. Learning the “why” adds to the developer's bag of tricks, so when problems are encountered it's not a matter of using a previous solution or finding a new one, but rather how can the problem be approached. It looks like Microsoft is going in the right direction with articles like these, the new-ish focus on abstract concepts/patterns in architecture and the like. Thanks, Microsoft.
Anyway, these articles are a must-read, even if you know all about data structures: