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

I have dabbled with many resources before in hope of learning to program and learn basics of CS. I have looked at intro course sequences of schools like MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc. Most have partial resources locked down. I have dabbled with books and they felt like shit. Even the book Think Python by Allen Downey was all over the place.

The books and blogs at least taught me basic syntax constructs like variables, function definition, loops, etc. But I couldn't understand how to package them up (compose) to use them in solving problems.

Then I started studying through Berkeley's 3 course intro CS61A, CS61B, CS61C. They have all materials in the open and if you are following the most current iteration of the course, they even post solutions to the problems. It was godsend for me.

Now, I am confident to learn more CS topics using courses from CMU, MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, etc. The thing that was holding me back was the lack of confidence of programming and understanding really what a program was doing.

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

Professor Leonard on Youtube got me through calc 1/2/3 just last year.

I will forever worship the ground that man walks on for his mathematics help.

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 that helped me was Richard Buckland's Higher Computing lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE7l6Adoiiw&list=PL6B940F08B...)

The best way to learn is to keep trying and particularly trying to understand what you do not understand.

As Feynman said on his last board: What I can not create, I do not understand.

So if you are one of those people who is stuck, or you watch CS61A/B and it does not work for you, just keep looking and trying.

CS61A in particular is important for understanding the nuts and bolts of how programming works. The people who tended to do well in the course had little prior exposure to specific programming languages outside the prerequisite class. I think that all the abstraction that other programming languages do get in the way of understanding why the languages made some of those design choices, which is why throwing all the abstraction out the window is important to understand what's really going on.

I'm reminded of an experiment I was told to do when I was learning how to be a better cook, and I complained that I didn't understand what bay leaf was adding to a dish. Someone suggested cooking some plain white rice with some bay leaf, and I could finally taste the peppery notes it added. Sometimes you need a neutral substrate to see the details of the thing you're trying to learn.