CS50 - Harvards free computer science course

[aabarker]

CS50 is Harvard's own first semester of computer science, and it's online for free.

**Computer science is NOT web development. **

IMO your time would be much better spend learning Wordpress and getting sales experience if you haven't yet made your first buck. Moreover.. I think it's a bad first course to take *if* your goal is to make money from website development. There's tons of great courses out there for that - killersites has one, there's codeacademy, freecodecamp, and so on.

After being comfortable with their webstack of choice,  who here has tried CS50? One line caught my eye in particular:

Quote

One of the reasons why they do use PHP in CS50 is because it is heavily inspired by C. By week 7, students have a solid C foundation. Picking up PHP at that point isn’t difficult because of the syntactical similarities.

7 weeks of C, with carryover to other languages. That sounds useful. On the other hand, you learn stuff like how the mouse pointer works on a very technical level - useless for making money with web development... in my opinion. 

What do you think? Has anybody taken CS50 and completed it?

[Lukasz]

I tried it and I would recommend it, but for someone who wants to do backend stuff. No WD whatsoever there .

I have not finished it though, as I wanted to study sth that I will use in an actual workspace. 
Having said that I think it is a great course if you have some free time and I will finish it at some point in my life.

Quick outline

• There are 9 lectures, each less then 2 hours. 
• Main programming ideas are being introduced there.
• Shorts - short clips, explaining ideas in detail.  
• 9 problem sets - sth like assignment - each 10 - 20 hours to solve (or longer)
• Them problems are challenging, especially to someone with no prior programming experience. But doable
• No PHP anymore. Just C, python and javascript. 

Edited November 2, 2017 by Lukasz

[administrator]

9 hours ago, aabarker said:

7 weeks of C, with carryover to other languages. That sounds useful. On the other hand, you learn stuff like how the mouse pointer works on a very technical level - useless for making money with web development... in my opinion. 

It will help as much as learning any programming will help. But I would suggest that C is so displaced from web development that it would have little impact. Better to learn a web stack language or good ol' fashion database design. Optimized databases don't get the attention they deserve, because they have a  HUGE impact on web app performance.

Stef

[administrator]

... About coding courses: yes, there are lots of courses out there, but my students and I are biased about the killersites.com courses! 

That said, you will see me pivoting to entrepreneur and business + tech courses now. First, because my coding courses cover everything you need to start doing commercial work, and two,  I have yet to find a good course on the business/entrepreneurial end of things. 

Stef