<story><title>CS101: Introduction to Computing Principles</title><url>https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>khaki54</author><text>This course looks &amp;quot;fine&amp;quot;; however, I would recommend that anyone interested in exploring CS (or perhaps even if you are a self-taught and very able coder who wants to learn those missing fundamentals ) takes CS50 out of Harvard.&lt;p&gt;It is easily the most engaging course I have ever taken and it&amp;#x27;s available for free on edx.org or you can take the &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; class from Harvard extension for a couple grand.  You can go into this class as an underwater basket weaver or a strong coder and get a ton out of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kevinventullo</author><text>I think this Stanford course is aiming at a different goal than Harvard’s CS50. Harvard’s course seems to be aimed at people who are coders or want to be better at coding, so you learn about different languages, algorithms&amp;#x2F;data structures, SQL and such.&lt;p&gt;The Stanford course, especially the second half, appears to be more in the spirit of liberal arts. It covers high-level concepts in CS (server vs client, how does the internet work, what is encryption) that even someone who never writes code professionally will be able to use. They’ll be better able to read newspaper articles on tech topics, or perhaps more to the point, better equipped to be a PM&amp;#x2F;lawyer&amp;#x2F;BD in the tech space.</text></comment>
<story><title>CS101: Introduction to Computing Principles</title><url>https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>khaki54</author><text>This course looks &amp;quot;fine&amp;quot;; however, I would recommend that anyone interested in exploring CS (or perhaps even if you are a self-taught and very able coder who wants to learn those missing fundamentals ) takes CS50 out of Harvard.&lt;p&gt;It is easily the most engaging course I have ever taken and it&amp;#x27;s available for free on edx.org or you can take the &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; class from Harvard extension for a couple grand.  You can go into this class as an underwater basket weaver or a strong coder and get a ton out of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aabhay</author><text>I’d recommend CS 61a&amp;#x2F;b&amp;#x2F;c from UC Berkeley. I think it’s available online as well. The reason I like these three courses is that they cover the three key aspects of computing — programming, data structures, and machine structures. I find that the last part is often left out because we “abstract” away low level features of computers, but learning even the basics of page tables, caches, instruction sets, timing, etc. is extremely critical to a complete understanding of what’s going on.</text></comment>