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

The same can be said about any subject or skill.

If you go to any class, you'll find some people are interested, others aren't. No matter the subject, be it sport, physics, math, chemistry, art, history, etc. Same teacher, same material, different reaction from students.

There's no artificial "ceiling" at play that's specific to coding.

The book is amazing, but it is also very extensive/overwhelming and I found that the lectures provide a better guiding structure for myself and the lecturers are also quite entertaining at times. The website also provides additional material related to the course such as exams, projects and lecture notes.

My 80s high school had no programming classes to speak of, but in my own tinkering, I'd done a lot of BASIC & Hypercard Hyperscript tinkering, & I'd looked over enough assembly & Pascal to get the gist. I felt, "I'm good at computers, I can learn what I need there on demand, I've got to major in college in other deeper subjects that I can mainly learn from those departments." And, "being a software developer" alone seemd too narrow an ambition - I thought I'd instead be "someone-good-at-software" in some other kind of innovative industry.

Still, I took CS60A because I didn't want whatever watered-down stuff they'd provide to non-majors – Pascal, I think, at the time. Within a week or 2, CS60A convinced me: there's more interesting depth to 'Computer Science' worth learning.

That continued through CS60B, and by the time I'd done CS60C & the combined EE intro theory & lab course – EE1(?) then, I think, unsure its current equivalent – I'd felt like a circle had been closed on my understanding of how it all works, from logic gates (which I'd understood since a 5th-grade science project & then "Rocky's Boots") through to high-level stack-based languages.

I was hooked, & then knew CS would be at least one thing I'd major in. I ultimately double-majored it with Economics.

Then once out in paid employment, I'd work with people with Bachelors or even Masters degrees from schools not quite-as-famous for their Computer Science programs, and those people would be missing basic knowledge & intuitions about algorithms, data-structures, & OSes that'd been well covered way back in the Berkeley CS60A/B/C intro series.

Of course, the depth of tools & experience available to kids through high school age is wildly different, & better, now. And, if your highest goal is professional training as a software developer, college itself (& college-style courses) may not be ideal, compared to just doing as much as you can, as fast as you can, in the most-challenging workplace that'll take you, filling in gaps with self-study as needed.

But if you want a high-quality college-style education in Computer Science, with the breadth & depth for lots of possibility-frontier work – not just the surface stuff evident to a younger or outside view – Berkeley's curriculum was an excellent eye-opener for me. For precocious students, it should probably replace any "Python & C++" coding in AP high school classes.