Ask HN: Holy grails of free, online courses? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Holy grails of free, online courses?

86 pointstdoubleu18 comments

I've recently gone through Karpathy's Zero-to-Hero course (https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html) and the content is just superb. What other courses like this exist?

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Here are some past Ask HN threads worth mentioning:

1. "Best Lecture Series": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34591291

2. "Top Coursera Courses": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245125

3. "Best MOOCs": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16745042

4. "Coursera Courses": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22826722

There are some great recommendations and some of them are among the best MOOCs that I have ever taken.

Not necessarily tech-related, but I consider Ableton's online music classes to be a brilliant gift to the online portion of humanity:

https://learningmusic.ableton.com/

https://learningsynths.ableton.com/

There's cs61a:

https://cs61a.org/

(I'm doing the Denero version: https://cs61a.org/denero.html) If you pass the command-line flag: `--local` you can run the tests without triggering the submission system.

accompanying book:

https://www.composingprograms.com/

The moocs from University of Helsinki are really good. Here's the current Python one:

https://programming-23.mooc.fi/

And there's their web dev course, called Full Stack Open:

https://fullstackopen.com/en/

If learning web dev, you can't go wrong with The Odin Project:

https://www.theodinproject.com/

Very fun watching this guy chat about probability.

Statistics 110 Probability: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/stat110/youtube

And this guy (Erik Demaine) is an absolute gem for introductory algorithms.

Introduction to Algorithms: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms...

Hastie and Tibshirani's class on Statistical Learning is a must for someone that wants to learn about ML. All of the classes are available here (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rOzrYsAxzQy...) and the book recently got a Python version to complement the original R classes.

https://www.statlearning.com/

Big list of free programming books:

* https://ebookfoundation.github.io/free-programming-books/boo...

Online courses: https://ebookfoundation.github.io/free-programming-books/cou...

Dan Grossman’s Programming Language series on Coursera is one of the best courses I’ve taken at any level of education

For guitarists, Paul Davids’ courses through his website are excellent

Would you recommend this for a proficient programmer with a decade of experience in non functional languages?

If you have any interest in functional programming and higher-order programming, or understanding the functional parts of languages you use now, then I'd say yes. At least as the course was structured a decade ago or whenever I took it. A lot of "non-functional" languages have functional influences. If you'd like to get a better idea of what those are and how they can be used more effectively and for higher-order programming, it would be a good course to take.

In addition to what the other comment says, I found that his class drastically sped up my ability to pick up new programming languages. The class teaches an underlying "grammar" that's common to all programming languages, almost like a linguistic approach. I also learned a "meta-language" by which to speak about (and effectively Google/research) any programming languages.

Is that the one that uses Standard ML?

Yep for part A. B and C use Ruby and Scheme I think

I can thoroughly recommend Execute Program [0] by Destroy All Software

[0]: https://www.executeprogram.com/courses

MitX quantum mechanics series. And intro to Bio. And molecular bio. And, of course, Khan.

A lot of the MitX couses from 2017-2020ish were outstanding.

edX had some absolutely amazing free courses that still is a part of me. They were really tough though

FastAI’s course seems good so far

+1 for https://course.fast.ai/

I like the Python course on HackerRank.

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