It's a great question to find some hidden gems!
Personally, I prefer taking courses on edX.
In my opinion, it is one of the best online sources of learning out there, speaking from experience.
Many prestigious and well-known institutes such as MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, etc. worked and keep working collectively to provide high-quality material (lectures, labs, assignments) with each course having an exceptional community which will be present at all times to guide you and answer your questions.
Also, there are many inspiring stories of learners from around the world, who have spent time taking courses on edX.
Whatever platform or class you take, just remember that you get out of it only what you put in. You cannot learn by observing - you need to jump in and engage deeply with the content. Enjoy!
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Top comments (21)
CS50x was my first self-learning attempt, and I still think it's the highest quality free material I've come across. I recommend it to any beginner.
I did that course too. Really helped me find my domain of interest in the first semester of uni
The MOOC that I talk about at every opportunity is Programming Languages, Part A. It teaches, in a structured approach, the basics of strong statically-typed functional programming, using a venerable academic language called SML. The thing about SML is that it's been influential in different ways on most of the popular FP languages we have today, like OCaml, Scala, Haskell, Rust. And the instructor's (Prof. Dan Grossman) approach is to build knowledge using small, structured lessons. I highly recommend it.
One of the best courses I ever took was, Coursera: Python for everybody by Charles Serverance back in 2013
This is how I learned Python! I really liked the structure of the course.
Learning how to learn is a highly acclaimed course out there. Would definitely suggest you give it a try. It's a bit slow-paced but the information there will surely help. There's a synonymous book for the course called A mind for numbers
I really prefer EdX too.. I think it's specialized in campus-like experiences which is my favorite type of courses.
I'm currently taking MIT's intro to probability and data.. it's a lot of work and exactly like you said, just observing is as good as not doing it at all.. it needs a lot of engagement and self work.
'Learning how to learn' from Coursera. It's one of the best non-technical courses that I've come across and I believe learnings from that course can be applied to any field.
Building Your Leadership Skills is not a tech related course but it helped me not to be a leader or anything, but to build basic interpersonal skills and to be more empathetic and aware, I recommend it to those who like I was had trouble communicating or taking initiative.
Engineering Software as a Service, by Armando Fox and David Patterson, Berkeley. They were on Coursera back when I took it, now they're on edX. It's actually an online version (maybe stripped down a bit, but still functional) of their CS169 course.
I learned several things from that course:
It's gonna be Udacity and if is non-technical is the social psychology that is really cool.
fullstackopen.com/en/ is a free and very popular course of what I´ve heard.
Martin Odersky's "Functional Programming Principles in Scala" on Coursera is the best CS MOOC I've taken (in-progress), and I've taken a few.
Not only do you have the inventor of the language himself teaching the course, but the pace is perfect such that it's not so slow that you get bored or fast that you get lost. But I think this bit will depend a lot on the student (I have no functional programming experience).
The best thing though is that all the annoying boilerplate setup etc that will usually bog you down when you start a new language is almost completely taken care of by the course. Martin has you clone a git repo, the repo is all setup and JustWorks, and the assignment submission is automated, so you never need to leave the IDE / command line except to check the results of your submission and to watch the lessons.
CS-224 Computer Organization. It's a recorded course on YouTube. It's great if you want to understand how computers work. I watched the videos while I was taking a similar course in college. I learned from the YouTube one far more than I did in formal course.
The courses of Dr.Chuck (Charles Severance) on Coursera: Programming for Everybody and Web Design for Everybody.
CS50. All the way.
I haven’t taken too many MOOCs though, and I actually haven’t finished CS50 yet, it’s just one of those that you just know
The Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python course on edX.