Hello, i haven’t been very active in Freecodecamp lately, turns out i’m not very good at front end, and i’m really into computer science, so a little after Freecodecamp i spent a long while looking for other learning resources, i thought it’d be nice to share some of them here. Keep in mind most of them lean towards computer science, security and mathematics.
Would anyone be interested in reading about my(self taught) career in Computer Science?
Keep in mind most of it will not have a lot of front end, as i’m focusing on CS. I plan on finishing freecodecamp but not in the near future.
As i am beginning my career from scratch i will be documenting most of what i use to study (courses, books, and other resources) for personal use, since i always do that. I was thinking of creating a simple wordpress blog and posting these documentations/reviews, probably once a month talking about each course, book and project that i’ve built along the way. This kind of resource is what i’d like to have now as i’m beginning my career, so maybe it will be useful to someone else too.
For example this month i did harvard’s CS50 course, and at the end of the month i will have finished reading 3 books: “C primer plus”, “21st century C” and “Build your own lisp”. I also partially read “Learn C the hard way” but i decided it wasn’t a good learning resource, so my first post would be talking about these materials and how good(or bad) they are from the point of view of someone who’s learning it for the first time.
What do you think, would any of you be interested in reading monthly “reviews” of online learning resources?
Is this the type of computer science job that involves data analysis and such? If so then i would be interested. Someone asked me few months ago if i was capable and interested in such job, but i wasn’t sure.
You have to be a computer scientist to analyse data, since you’ll use a lot of data structures and probably have to come up with new algorithms to adapt to the needs of your project. But this is an area to specialize, i haven’t yet decided on what i’m going to specialize since i’m just beginning to take foundational courses. It should take me a few months before i decide.
But yes, data analysis is a subfield of computer science.
I’m a computer science autodidact too, and like yourself, I’m a beginner. I’ve had this idea of a review blog for a while; looks like I’m gonna have a competitor ! By the way, how do you manage to complete courses and books that fast? CS50 and three C programming books in one month!? That’s fast. I’m quite sceptical of people who claim to have finished course/book XYZ in a week or month. But I also get awestruck. So what are the learning secrets of fast learners like you?
Well, there aren’t any secrets really. I quit both my job and college because i wasn’t having the opportunity to properly study the things i wanted to study. So now i spend 6~12 hours studying everyday. C primer plus was the only big book in that list, it took me about 2 weeks, the rest are only 200 pages long, maximum, so they don’t take more than a day if i don’t have any problems with the exercises. Since C primer plus covers all of C basic principles, the other books are really easy to digest, i just got lucky with my book choices i think.
As for CS50, most Psets didn’t take me long, except for PSET5 which took almost a week and i had to review a lot of what i had previously read on “C primer plus” (and it turns out the books lies to you in some aspects related to pointers and arrays, so that confused me for a few days in a single function call that led to a segfault, but other than that the book is really well written).
I also didn’t finish the final project for CS50 yet since i’m more interested in the book “Build your own lisp”, but i’ll be doing a decrypter(if that word even exists) for Caesar cipher and vigenere of any value, you input the message and the algorithm gives you the original values. But finishing Build your own lisp i’ll move on to it, i still have 7 days, more than a 100 hours, it should be enough.
Before beginning CS50 i also read “The C programming language”, which might have helped me do the psets a little faster than usual, other than that, i can’t think of anything special. I just don’t have anything better to do, quite literally.
No offence bro. You don’t need the title. You need the knowledge. You take titles too seriously.
Wasn’t sure what exactly you meant by computer science. It’s now clear though. It’s exactly what that guy asked me if i could do.
I don’t have the email anymore it seems. I must have deleted it. But anyways it was all about statistics and patterns and algebra [i believe algebra was mentioned anyway] and it explained in detail what i would have to do.
Also the way you worded it, it sounds like you just started your studies, but you stated you are at the beginning of your career.
Oh, i didn’t mean “computer scientist” as in “you have to complete a degree and become a computer scientist”. I meant that you must study computer science, since that deals with data analysis. It’s all one and the same.
And yes, i plan on making a career out of it, i wouldn’t know a better way to phrase it. If i do make a blog, will be about what i study and possibly job interviews in the future.
Updated the list with https://www.vikingcodeschool.com/ . Seems like FCC except they have groups, haven’t had the time to properly review their curriculum as i’m a bit busy right now, but they do take 18% of your first years salary (of course, only if you do get hired by some company, otherwise it’s free).
Seem inferior to FCC because of that, but as usual, judge for yourself.
It seems its not free at all, removed from the main post.
Thanks for all the essential links. I try not to get overloaded by all the vast learning site’s out there but there are so many good ones! I can’t believe how many video course websites there are now, I’ve known about udemy and lynda for years but it seems like their success has spawned an entire wave of people thinking they can charge to see learning tutorials from people who are not certified to do so. It’s nice to see site’s that Ive had bookmarked for some time, hackthissite and cybrary are great, they got me into JavaScript. Anyone trying to do deep learning should bookmark this post.
Found a pretty good React course, the author explains why things work the way they do and how to best address React shortcomings. I did some paid courses from Udemy and Lynda in react and both were pretty low quality and horrible, this one is superior in every possible way. He has other courses, but i haven’t done them and can’t guarantee the same quality.
! By the way, how do you manage to complete courses and books that fast? CS50 and three C programming books in one month!? That’s fast. I’m quite sceptical of people who claim to have finished course/book XYZ in a week or month. But I also get awestruck. So what are the learning secrets of fast learners like you?