How to Take Harvard's CS50 | Full Roadmap with Free Certificate

in this video I'm going to show you the exact road map that I took when I was learning to code with Harvard's cs50 and I wanted to point out the obvious choosing the correct path for doing cis50 might mean the difference between finishing successfully all the materials and learning how to code versus getting frustrated and giving up okay so if you're just if you just found out about cs50 you probably already know that it's a very good Quartz in my opinion it's the best course if you take all these cs50 programs and you're able to complete all your projects not only will you have learned how to code in a correct way without losing time in tutorial hell using you know fairly um up-to-date Technologies etc etc not only we have learned a lot but you you will also come out of here with a fairly robust portfolio so you will be able to put a lot of your assignments which are really projects you will be able to put that on your personal page you can link to it on your resume so you could really use that to apply for jobs in the future okay so the first thing you need to do is you know you go to edx.org or just go on Google type in cs50 edx and it will take you um to this page here computer science courses and programs from Harvard and they have a lot of options when I took the course they pretty much only had their main course plus three follow-up courses so that was web development Ai and game development nowadays they have another course that's only on python which I highly recommend you start with what I did when I took the chords is I took the main course by week seven I believe they teach python I was totally lost after the lecture I could not complete the assignments so I went on a tangent and I basically ended up taking the whole python course before coming back to the main course and finishing it that took me about a month which was okay because I wasn't really my goal wasn't to finish as quickly as possible my goal was to learn and my goal was to only code two hours per day and as long as I was coding two hours per day and learning and actually finishing the assignments and and you know working on my projects I knew that it was a matter of time before I finished all my courses and so the way I recommend that you take these courses is first you want to take the python course why because the python chords in my opinion is a lot slower paced it's a lot it's much more beginner friendly the pace of the main course is the same Pace as the students at Harvard it's very intense and if you've never learned how to code and if you have a thousand things going on in your life and you don't necessarily have all the time in the world to learn how to code you might get thrown off you might get frustrated you might end up quitting if you start with the main course and it's too hard for you so instead you should go ahead and start with baby steps start with the python chords the first few lectures the first few weeks actually they're fairly easy and by fairly easy I mean I obviously as I said I took that course after I already haven't taken six weeks of their main course I already knew how to code but I would the entire time that I was taking that course I was noticing what a good option this course is for beginners so again if you're looking at cs50 go ahead and start with cs50 introductions to programming with python so that is this course over here now you do want to enroll on edx you enroll you follow the on-screen instructions you make an account I think they might also ask you to create a GitHub account GitHub in a nutshell is like the virtual environment in which you code up all your assignments and they also use it to grade your assignments it's all one platform where you can store your code update your code submit it Etc I'm not going to get into all the details they are they do a very good job at explaining exactly all the steps in order to create your edx account in order to create your GitHub account do not pay for anything I will explain how you can get a certificate from Harvard for free so once you've all signed up with everything they will redirect you to the actual course page which has basically nothing to do with edx edx is only used for keeping track of your grades and so once you're all signed up it will redirect you to this page which is the courses page over here you have all your lectures on the left right here you watch your lecture Pro tip you could watch the lecture twice don't feel frustrated because you have to watch the lecture three times if you don't understand something just watch the lecture again and you watch lecture here and then afterwards you have your problem set which over here gives you exactly the instructions that you need in order to submit your assignment and what the assignments are Etc and so you don't really deal with edx at all um maybe at maybe at the end to submit your final project I think it goes through edx or you submit a 3DX and then they give your final grade but again you don't have to pay for anything and over here on the left you'll see that it says cs50 certificate so this is a certificate that is produced by Harvard has nothing to do with edx and once you confirm that you finish your course um they will you'll follow the instructions here and you can get a certificate with your name on it from Harvard University without having to pay for it 100 for free and so this is the reason why I say that it's not worth getting the separate edx certificate you're basically paying or you're gonna pay for the same thing that you're already getting for free so once you finish programming with python let's go back over here you should definitely do the main course and the main course is cs50x over here again you're going to enroll in the course you follow the on-screen instructions and then I'll redirect you eventually to the main courses page which looks like this you'll see it's slightly longer 10 weeks again you're just gonna follow all the instructions that are on here and eventually once you finish all your assignments you'll be able to get your certificate um also you have your grade book which if you click on it you'll be able to see your grades for example if I click on mine here you'll see that I've completed all the assignments and once they have once I completed all the assignments this green notification here showed up telling me um how to get my cs50 certificate click here what not and follow the instructions get your free certificate once you've finished the main course at this point you've pretty much have a fairly robust knowledge of your the final project for the main course is to build your full stack application using flask and Jinja which if you wanted to you could totally write your own app that you can then sell to other people with that now that's probably not a good idea still because obviously flask is an okay framework but it's fairly simple if you wanted to use a more robust framework for more complicated apps if you wanted to make your database a lot easier to work with and maybe even abstract SQL out of the whole equation maybe just write everything including your backend code and your database code all in Python then you'll you need to take the next course and so the next course I need to take now is cs50s web programming with python and JavaScript and over here in this course you're gonna go deeper into python how to use classes how to abstract SQL and work directly with models using uh Django you're going to learn about react and JavaScript whereas the main course is fairly wide and it's teaching a lot of different areas in computer science the web programming course goes deeper into programming from the web specifically using Python and so again once you sign up for this course it'll take you to their dedicated page you can go ahead and and you know the drill after you finish all your assignments you'll get a certificate from this and at this point you probably have a very nice portfolio and I would totally recommend at this point you make yourself a CV you make yourself a portfolio website and you start applying for jobs I have a separate video on this channel I'll link it below describing how I marketed my Services after finishing cs50 and how I managed to land a job so again at this point you're fairly proficient at programming for the web and you should be able to get a junior developer job preferably at a local company you know because there's probably like a smaller amount of applicants I'm sure you can it'll be easier for you to like you know sell yourself as someone who can get the job done who can learn on the job and so you can either stop here and just go out in the world either work on your own project or get a job as a junior which if you do that that's totally fine but I would recommend you do two more courses one of them is the artificial intelligence course so again I'm not going to go through it but it's the same procedure you sign up you follow the instructions there you complete the course and what you're going to get out of that course really is you're going to be a lot more proficient on object oriented programming and to a certain level also algorithms which will just add to your general knowledge will make you more proficient in Python and again I've heard something like you need 10 000 lines of code in order to really become good at coding and that's just adding to it on top of all these courses I do recommend and I remember hearing from David Malin a while ago that he recommends students should take a dedicated algorithms course and the course that he pointed to is Princeton's algorithm scores and so here's the course it's via Coursera which means that it's a premium course you do have to pay for a membership I think it's like it's not that much maybe like 50 a month it could be less I don't remember right now again this this course will strengthen your data structures your rhythms and they teach it in Java which is a language that is not taught at cs50 I'm in the process of enrolling for this course I still haven't take that it's definitely on my to-do list and again just because I have a job now doesn't mean that I stopped learning you always want to continue learning and I recommend that if you already working on a project that's profitable or if you already have a job you know you can still put in two hours a day of coding when you have free time it's possible and an algorithms course in Java will just it will just add to your skill set it doesn't mean that you have to become a Java developer eventually but I think that adding an additional language has a lot of benefits and algorithms data structures even if you're not going to use that all the time it's still good to have at least the fundamentals of how to write efficient code and how to solve Computing problems efficiently so that's it for for this video I hope that it was helpful if you have any questions feel free to write them below I wanted to emphasize the obvious and that is that once you start the learning path do not deviate from it do not start one course and then go to different course and then try to come back a while later that's just complicating everything for you if you don't understand something what you need to do is continue to find the solution until you find it you do not just because you feel frustrated now you do not go now and start a new course

Channel: Kombina

Views: 722,442

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Id: 3xaVX0cluDo

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023