Ask HN: What's the best free course in your area of expertise? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the best free course in your area of expertise?

154 pointsFervicus31 comments

Let's compile a list of the best free courses on various subjects. Video courses are preferred; it's nice to have a backlog of videos to watch when the opportunity arises, like while flying.

View on HN

Xeno Kovah's courses on low-level systems architecture, security, firmware, reversing & vulnerabilities, https://p.ost2.fyi

"OST2: A new way to grow security talent for open source projects", https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/ost2/

> .. he ended up working for Apple. There he worked on securing all the lesser-known firmwares on Macs and peripherals - everything from 3rd party GPUs to SecureBoot for monitors! He worked on the x86-side of the T2 SecureBoot architecture, and his final project was leading the M1 SecureBoot architecture - being directly responsible for designing a system that could provide iOS-level security, while still allowing customer choice to trust arbitrary non-Apple code such as Linux bootloaders. He left Apple in Dec 2020 after the M1 Macs shipped, so he could work full time on Open Security Training.

Even if it seems like it's outdated somewhat due to the breakneck progress of machine learning in the past few years the legendary Cs231n is still the course to start your ML journey with. Especially as taught by Andrej Karpathy. You should be able to find recordings of it on YouTube. Make sure you get the ones from Karpathy years at Stanford. As brilliant as Andrej is as a ML practitioner, he is an absolute world class mastermind at teaching this stuff.

CMU's Andy Pavlo database courses and related webinars

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOi... https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOi...

On building iOS, iPadOS and macOS apps using the latest version of SwiftUI: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCI...

Helped me a lot in building the apps I have published on https://lowtechguys.com/

pwn.college from the folks at ASU SEFCOM is by a significant margin the best comprehensive binary exploitation training you can get. There are video lessons from some of the top professors and graduate (and undergraduate) TAs, CTF players, and more alongside a massive suite of hands on practice and a community for discussion and learning.

Video training sessions: https://youtube.com/@pwncollege Challenges: pwn.college Discord: https://pwn.college/discord

Modern Colour Theory For Traditional And Digital Painting Media by Dr David. J.C. Briggs, >http://www.huevaluechroma.com

Thanks so much for posting my website here! Who knew hackers were so interested in colour! Someone just suggested adding paid courses as well, so I hope it's okay if I add that I also give a live online colour course that's not too expensive and has a lot of new material I've produced since finishing the main part of The Dimensions of Colour in 2017. There's a course outline here and a form if you want more information https://sites.google.com/site/djcbriggs/tmct

Android/Kotlin course on Udacity, by Google: https://www.udacity.com/course/developing-android-apps-with-...

This one is slightly out of date, but it's great, something I'd happily pay $300 or so for. The value is heavily subsidized by Google. I have taught week-long Android professional certifications and this does a lot better than most of them out there.

Wish there was an excellent and advanced Android/Kotlin course.

How advanced would you like it? This covers a good amount of material past beginner, like coroutines and viewmodels, but I can recommend some (paid) books if there's a particular topic.

Let’s say advanced Kotlin and Coroutines etc.

More importantly I would love some course that challenges a senior developer in not only impl. coding but also in architecture and design beyond the famous fad architecture in Android world as of now

Sorry, just noticed this. Arguably, there's only really one proper architecture today: UI (View+ViewModels), Data, and possibly Domain in between. Most of the others seem to have more cons than pros. This is a great guide on architectures, more up to date than most articles on the topic: https://developer.android.com/topic/architecture

The previous linked tutorial covers coroutines well enough to do things with it. If you want to go further, I'd recommend figuring out how to combine Kotlin Flow with Compose; neither Compose nor Flow really shine without the other. Sadly can't find tutorials on this either. Planning to open source some templates some time this year.

MIT course series on Computation Structures:

https://computationstructures.org/

Stephen Boyd’s course on Convex Optimization https://see.stanford.edu/Course/EE364A

thank you!

When I was in high school and college I used to watch Dana Mosely's math videos. He got the best explanations I've ever found. https://coolmathguy.com/

* Machine Learning, Andrew Ng, Coursera

* Practical Deep Learning for Coders, fast.ai

* Mathematics for Machine Learning Specialization, Imperial College London

* Deep Learning Specialization, Andrew Ng, Coursera

Maybe not my expertise, but it's rare to see this kind of content

so if you want to learn something like: PCI/CXL/USB/x86/ARM/DRAM/SAS/AHCI/NVM/SATA/Virtualization/UEFI/Thunderbolt

then I've seen this https://www.mindshare.com/ being recommended

This Tour of Heroes tutorial can teach you just about everything that you need to know about Angular, and it can be completed in a pretty short amount of time.

https://angular.io/tutorial/tour-of-heroes

I would like people to add paid courses. I don’t mind paying $500+ if it’s really well done

I agree with the sentiment that you get what you pay for, but there is so much market fluff that most of the time true gems aren't recognized, and 90% of what you see, a true professional in that area would rank, hard down.

That being said, valuable material shouldn't be available for free. You should have to exchange something for it because the author put in work and expertise to make it happen, and they won't be able to provide more or support it with a price tag of free. People have to have some incentive and be able to offset costs.

Algorithms often also control what you see so even lists like this are quickly corrupted. It truly is an 'Anathem' world now.

Any paid course that you recommend?

Any of rickhanson.net courses. Genuine guy and his heart is really into helping people learn to change their mind.

In my experience there is almost an inverse relationship between course quality and whether it's paid or not.

People who are experts in their fields typically don't need to make money from selling educational materials. They make enough money in their field of expertise, e.g. by being a researcher or professor. The reason they publish educational materials is typically to improve their public image or become a bit more famous, and they want as many people as possible to have access.

On the other hand, paid courses (think Udemy and stuff like that) are often made by people whose goal is to put in the minimum effort plus some marketing to sell a course. They are not experts in the field, and don't need to be, because marketing is more important. These courses end up being shallow low-quality fluff.

I disagree. One of the best educational resources I've seen is MasterClass and tbh, people like Wayne Gretzky, Metallica, and Will Wright don't need more money nor visibility.

I've taught courses myself. We charge a lot but in my experience, it doesn't make money. It's just a social giving back thing. It's enough to cover costs of production, but not opportunity costs. But we charge because the people who come for the free courses often leave by lunch. Even when it's an expensive course paid in full by a company, people will skimp out because of "work" and it just wastes everyone's time.

It takes about 4 hours to produce 1 hour worth of slides and content. So the income can be worse than freelance coding, even when the hourly rate is higher.

Rule of thumb IMO is that the person teaching spends at least 80% of their time on the topic that they teach.

I disagree, but perhaps there is a difference between technical and non-technical subjects. I'm aware of Masterclass and I don't know what the incentive for people to put their teachings behind a paywall is there, but if you are under the illusion that you can learn any technical subject by watching 1-3 hours (most of the courses are of that length) of videos, you are falling into instant gratification trap of modern society, just like reading popular news. These things are the pop science education equivalents of TikTok. They are interesting, but they are entertainment, not education.

The unfortunate truth is that if you want to become an expert in a technical topic, you need to put in hard work beyond 1-3 hours of watching a video, despite what all the YouTube influencers may want you to believe.

Let me chime back in here since I brought up paid courses. When I say paid courses I did NOT mean courses offered by a platform that sells paid content. Especially Masterclass. I don't want to learn from a celebrity. I want to learn from someone normal with a passion for what they have learned and want to share it with the internet in a genuine and authentic way. In that spirit, I am talking about independent teachers, generally authors, professors, researchers who have dedicated lots of years to acquire expertise. They sell courses not because they need the money, but because its passive income and simply worth it.

CS50 is nice.

ReactJS: https://scrimba.com/learn/learnreact

Also just started the free FastAI course, seems very good so far

Kevin Powell on CSS - YouTube

Jen Simmons on CSS grid - YouTube

Justinguitar.com for guitar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com