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Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding

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Re: Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding

#21

Post by brightball »

throwaway71271 wrote: post #7

One person's best learning resource is another person's nightmare. We still have not understood how to tach coding. The subject seems to be completely non linear, and some people get stuck and cant move on and the teachers cant figure out why and they cant figure out why, it could last 1 month or could last 5 years, and at some point some random thing they read or watched completely unlocks them. (For me the thing th…

I still remember how confused I was in my 101 course at Clemson. I was certain I was going to have to change my major.

Then one night on a project I was just staring at the code at 3am…and it suddenly all made sense. Got A’s in all my CPSC courses after that too.

Re: Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding

#23

Post by Already__Taken »

pharmakom wrote: post #17

I think that a pure programming course must be taught in Lisp since that is closest to the essence of computation with minimal syntactic overhead. once that is mastered, switching to an industrial language is just a matter of mapping a particular syntax to a subset of lisp concepts. The old MIT courses follow this approach and are on youtube.

mapping knowledge is a learning antipattern IMO. It gets you very far, a good primitive more-so, but you fundamentally struggle to learn new paradigms.

Re: Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding

#24

Post by mdorazio »

Going to hard disagree here and say this is extremely person-specific. I already knew how to code in C++ and Python from high school AP classes. CS61A was awful for me and made me hate computer science. I tested out of 61B. 61C taught me how computers actually work and simultaneously made me quit the major.

Here's my take: if you are interested in computer science, the combination of these classes is great. If you are interested in being a software developer or building things quickly to solve problems there are far better resources out there.

Re: Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding

#25

Post by isaacfung »

matt3210 wrote: post #3

What about calc 1/2/3 ? I use those skills all the time in optimization work. Linear algebra? These are important skills that self teachers often forget

Someone shared a long list of visual explanation of math concepts a few days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37305485

I haven't gone through all of them but I definitely recommend 3blue1brown and betterexplained

Re: Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding

#26

Post by baq »

mdorazio wrote: post #24

Going to hard disagree here and say this is extremely person-specific. I already knew how to code in C++ and Python from high school AP classes. CS61A was awful for me and made me hate computer science. I tested out of 61B. 61C taught me how computers actually work and simultaneously made me quit the major. Here's my take: if you are interested in computer science , the combination of these classes is great. If you a…

Yeah it’s important to point out that programming is not software engineering is not computer science.

Computer science mostly requires a pencil and a piece of paper.

Programming is the act of making a computer do what you’ve written down on that paper.

Software engineering is figuring out what do you need the pencil for and once you’ve done it, making sure computers are doing what programmers think they told them to.

Re: Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding

#27

Post by [deleted] »

phlakaton wrote: post #13
throwaway71271 wrote: post #7

One person's best learning resource is another person's nightmare. We still have not understood how to tach coding. The subject seems to be completely non linear, and some people get stuck and cant move on and the teachers cant figure out why and they cant figure out why, it could last 1 month or could last 5 years, and at some point some random thing they read or watched completely unlocks them. (For me the thing th…

I think I generally agree. A student getting stuck on something doesn't mean they're not learning. To the contrary, those can be some of the times the student learns the most. In the case of them not "getting" pointers, for example, getting stuck might reveal they need to go back and solidify their understanding of the memory model, or how data is represented. These are good things to know you don't know! Even gettin…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding

#30

Post by beeburrt »

mdorazio wrote: post #24

Going to hard disagree here and say this is extremely person-specific. I already knew how to code in C++ and Python from high school AP classes. CS61A was awful for me and made me hate computer science. I tested out of 61B. 61C taught me how computers actually work and simultaneously made me quit the major. Here's my take: if you are interested in computer science , the combination of these classes is great. If you a…

> ...there are far better resources out there.

Such as?

Genuinely interested.

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