Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

• MITx "Introduction to Solid State Chemistry" [1]. I've never been good at chemistry, but this course managed to make it clear to me.

• MITx "Circuits and Electronics" [2][3][4] (three links because they have split it into three courses since I took it). Most electronics courses have not worked well for me. Some fail by using analogies that don't work for me. The analogies are either to things I don't understand, or to things I understand too well compared to the target audience for the course.

The latter might seem odd--how can understanding the analogous system too well cause a problem? It's because there usually isn't a perfect match between behavior of the analogous system and electronics. The more you know about the analogous system, the more likely you are to know about those places that don't match. If the author expects the students will not know about those parts, they won't mention the limitations from those parts. So you can end up expecting too much of the analogous system to apply.

Other courses have not worked for me by being too deep and detailed. For instance at one time I knew, from a solid state physics intro I took, how a semiconductor diode worked at a quantum mechanical level. I could do the math...but the course gave me no intuition for actually using the diode in a useful circuit.

The "Circuits and Electronics" course struck for me a perfect balance.

• MITx "Computation Structures" [5][6][7]. At the end of this three part course (of which I only took the first two parts), you will know how digital logic circuits work at the transistor level, and you will know how to design combinatorial and sequential logic systems at the gate level, and you will know how to design a 32-bit RISC processor...and you will have done all those designs, using transistor level and gate level simulators.

As I said, I only took the first two parts (didn't have time for the third). In the first two parts we did cover caching and pipelining, but we didn't use them in our processor. I believe that in the third part those and other optimization are added to the processor.

• Caltech "Learning From Data" [8]. The big selling point of this course is that it is almost the same as what Caltech students get when they take it on campus. The only watering down when I took it was the homework was multiple choice so it could be graded automatically.

The most outstanding thing about this course was Professor Abu-Mostafa's participation in the forums. He was very active answering questions. I don't know if he still does that now that the course is running in self-paced mode.

[1] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-solid-state-chemistr...

[2] https://www.edx.org/course/circuits-electronics-1-basic-circ...

[3] https://www.edx.org/course/circuits-electronics-2-amplificat...

[4] https://www.edx.org/course/circuits-electronics-3-applicatio...

[5] https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-part-1-dig...

[6] https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-2-computer...

[7] https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-3-computer...

[8] https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html

Strong +1 from me. I actually took this course in parallel to the compilers course at my university and the videos by Alex helped immensely.

Since no one has said it yet, /r/ludobots is pretty good. It's a University of Vermont course centered around ML for robotics. Specifically, the goal is to train a procedurally generated robot to walk using NNs. I wouldn't say it's the best I've ever taken but it's pretty unique and great fun.

I took the OCaml MOOC to learn OCaml programming. It had many portioned exercises, The video content was very high quality. The online code editor was pretty amazing as well, as it autoformatted the code as I typed it and even compiled and executed in the browser. Some of the problems required one to think outside the box.

https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/parisdiderot/56002S02/sessio...

I loved both Nand2Tetris and Coding the Matrix, although I had different experiences with them. For Coding the Matrix, I didn't buy the book, but just watched the videos and worked through the course work. This was super fun, but I could see someone who was not proficient in python getting really frustrated. I took it the first time it was run as well, and there were a couple of rough areas, but overall it was really enjoyable.

With Nand2Tetris, I just bought the book and worked through it without taking a class. I'd sketch out the hardware literally on the back of napkins and then try it in the simulator when I got home. It was incredibly fun, and I loved how it took everything down to first principles.