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Comment by progbits | Hacker News Reader

I've been learning a few new CS things recently and honestly I mostly find inverse correlation between cost and quality.

There are books from oreilly and paid MOOC courses that are just padded with lots of unnecessary text or silly "concept definition" quizzes to make them seem worth the price.

And there are excellent free YT video lectures, free books or blog posts.

Andrej's YT videos are one great example. https://course.fast.ai is another.

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It's not only about the cost, though. There's an inverse correlation with the glossiness of the content as well.

If the web page /content is too polished, they're most likely optimizing for wooing users.

Unlike a lot of the examples I gave in the sibling comments. Where the optimization is only on the love for the topic being discussed

  There's an inverse correlation with the glossiness of the content as well.

This is probably due to survivorship bias. Sites that have poor content and poor visual appeal (glossiness) never get on your radar.

i.e. Berkson's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

There are some extremely good CS textbooks which cost money. That being said, many good ML/AI texts are free. But it's not easy reading.

>And there are excellent free YT video lectures, free books or blog posts.

There's also a tremendous amount of extremely low quality YouTube and blog content.

Sure. I don't claim the free content is all good.

But from my limited sample size, the best free content is better than the best paid content.

Full ACK. I have also grown weary of payed course offerings, because many I have checked out were basically low quality or shallow.

Do you have recommendations for other high quality courses teaching CS things?

I can highly recommend CS50 from Harvard (https://www.youtube.com/@cs50). Even after being involved in tech for 25+ years, I learnt a lot from just the first lecture alone.

Disclosure: Professor Malan is a friend of mine, but I was a fan of CS50 long before that!

- operating system in three easy pieces (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP) is incredible for learning OS internals

- beej's networking guide is the best thing for network layer stuff https://beej.us/guide/

- explained from first principles great too https://explained-from-first-principles.com/

- pintos from Stanford https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs140/projects/pintos/pintos_...

Wow. Thanks for sharing. I had no idea that Professor Remzi and his wife Andrea wrote a book on Operating Systems. I loved his class (took it almost 22 years ago.) Will have to check his book out.

Build an 8-bit computer from scratch https://eater.net/8bit/ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2...

Andreas Kling. OS hacking: Making the system boot with 256MB RAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rapB5s0W5uk

MIT 6.006 Introduction to Algorithms, Spring 2020 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63EdVPNLG3T...

MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems https://www.youtube.com/@6.824

MIT 6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems, Fall 2018 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63VIBQVWguX...

CalTech cs124 Operating Systems https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=caltech+cs124&ia=web

try searching here at HN for recommendations https://hn.algolia.com

Thank you a ton for the links.

Replying to bookmark(hoard) all the thread links later.

Fellow hackers might also enjoy:

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

nand2tetris: https://www.nand2tetris.org/

I like the book better than the online course.

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