The thing I miss most about school is the university library. I used to spend lots of time reading old books and papers about computer science (and other subjects). It's hard to find those things at Barnes & Noble. -- KrisJohnson
Depending on your interests you may find some really good sources of these on the internet:
- MIT AI Lab publications: http://www.ai.mit.edu/publications.old/pubsDB/pubsDB/onlinehtml. A good starting point is ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/classic-hits/
- CiteSeer: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs. Search engine for CS papers and references/bibliographies.
- Alibris: http://www.alibris.com/. Second hand book store, where you can often find out-of-print books that you want and buy them cheap.
- Manuscripts of EwDijkstra: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/, from the 60s up to the present.
- HenryBaker's archive of research papers: http://linux.rice.edu/~rahul/hbaker/home.html.
- DennisRitchie's homepage: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/. Various Unix-related papers.
- Some collected papers from various authors on RichardFateman's website: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/264/papers/
Move to any big city! You'll have plenty of university libraries to choose from, and all the other great cultural elements as well.