Online Computer Science Courses

>>59517692
CS50 is supposedly good, but it's a bit cringy (although that's no reason to drop it). The first assignment is in scratch (that retarded programming language), and I've seen people here criticize it for that, but that's just the first one, the rest are in C.

>>59517953
Starting with scratch was one thing that turned me off of CS50. I'm not sure if it used to be just C, but now the course promises "Familiarity in a number of languages, including C, Python, SQL, and JavaScript plus CSS and HTML" which means really, it's going to superficially cover all those languages and give you nothing more than codeacademy level experience in any of them.

I'm leaning towards 6.00, but not being able to get the certificate tickles my autism. I'm also unemployed and bored out of my mind so I'll probably kill myself waiting for the next one to start

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>>59517692
Complete waste of time. Also, don't be an idiot and spend money on "certificates".... theyr'e totally useless.

Few years ago, Coursera contacted people who scored the best of their MOOCs and people who took the biggest number of courses and finished them. They promised to help them find jobs and they acted as their recruiter for big SV companies.

After a bunch of interviews, you know how many of them got jobs? ZERO.

>>59518008
https://x.cs50.net/2014/syllabus
The scratch thing shouldn't be a turn off because it's only there because the course tries to cater to people who never programmed anything in their lives. And if you look at the course, they teach you C in the first 8 weeks and then superficially cover webdev, so it's not that bad. If I were you I'd base my choice on whether I want to learn python or C.

>>59518029
I don't really expect a programming MOOC to instantly make me a professional programmer, but I do feel like my ability to progress is limited by a total lack of formal computer science training.

What would you recommend then over a CS MOOC, good old book learning?

>>59518084
The thing is the course seems to be catered to people who've never programmed anything in their lives, while I have some rudimentary coding experience and TONS of non-programming computing experience. 6.00 seems less of a 'programming appreciation' course. That's only the impression I get from the videos.

If I get far enough, I'd like to use programming in research/grad school to tackle botany questions from a bioinformatics approach, which makes me think python experience would be more valuable

>>59518138
Well yeah I would definitely go with the MIT MOOC then, unless you'd need to be able to write wicked fast programs for bioinformatics research (I guess you should look up what's better for your use case). You can always just do a MOOC first and then read a book to expand your knowledge afterwards.

>>59518221
That sounds about right, I should just pick one and stick with it since they are both pretty similar and low commitment (probably 6.00 at this point)

In posting this I was hoping to hear that certificates are useless (they are), or if there was a better way to learn CS than MOOCs, but I'm pretty sure my attention span is too shredded by 4chan to self-learn CS from a textbook

>>59518312
>I'm pretty sure my attention span is too shredded by 4chan to self-learn CS from a textbook
Actually I'm a lazy fuck, but I could learn programming and some basic CS like complexity and sorting algorithms, the things CS50x teaches you, because it's rewarding as fuck compared to maths.