Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by saneshark 2360 days ago
MIT has entire courseware available for free.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/#cat=engineering&s...

Introduction to Computer Science followed by Data Structures and Algorithms should give you a healthy start.

--

Learning these fundamentals is useful, but not necessarily immediately practical. Building and doing is the best way to learn. This is a good start, and the fundamentals will certainly give you an edge against most people graduating from a bootcamp, but after this I'd recommend finding a good tutorial, whatever the language that teaches you step by step how to build XYZ... I learned ruby/rails by doing Michael Hartl's tutorial building a microblogging platform like twitter.

1 comments

I used MIT OCW several years ago, but found it frustrating for three reasons:

1. Following the courseware is not always free, starting with the textbook

2. There are no milestones or credentials to track your progress

3. I found little community to interact with

This is just anecdotal. Some of these may have changed, be different.

Has anyone here worked through many of these courses themselves?

You have one of the best universities in the world sharing their material for free. That's what's valuable, not the forums that can be attached to the platform or the certificate that no employer cares about.
I mean the professor or university could be the best in the world in terms of scientific discovery or university rankings criteria and this does not mean these materials are necessarily the best learning experience.

Did you even take courses there? Have a different experience?

Yes, I have, and my experience has been the exact opposite. Their courses on calculus and linear algebra are some of the best that I've come across.