Ask HN: How to improve academics after drop out?

Read books. Read a great variety of books both fiction and non-fiction. After nearly a hundred books your level of education will increase in ways you cannot imagine.<p>Case in point. I am a military guy. I used to not read books very much. The first time I was in Afghanistan I started reading aggressively. I was constantly traveling around the country and while traveling could not rely on electronics for entertainment, so I read books. During that year I taught myself to program, I read probably 3 dozen novels, and towards the end of the deployment I read the CISSP CBK cover to cover. I took the CISSP exam and passed it the first time back when it was 250 questions and on paper.<p>Of the novels I read they were mostly thrillers, action stories, science fiction. It was mostly guy and nerd stuff. There were a tremendous number of donated novels in Afghanistan to keep military people entertained. Occasionally you get to a place and the only books available were romance novels, clearly the female soldiers were reading more than the males. I tried reading a science fiction&#x2F;fantasy&#x2F;romance novel once, but the one picked was porn written in words, and it was weird. Most of the investigative novels I read were written by female authors, I am not sure why that was, and they were really good. I read several non-fiction books as well.<p>Just read and build stuff.