Learn To Code For FREE At Harvard University // CS50: Introduction To Computer Science Review

what's going on everybody in this video i'm going to talk about the harvard cs50 introduction to computer science so if you want to get to the intro to computer science you can do it by going directly to the harvard website which is online hyphen learning harvard.edu and then just look up all courses and go to subject area and then programming and then you can get all their programming courses they do offer a few free programming courses here you can see they have an introduction of game development an introduction of web development with python and javascript the intro to computer science which is the one that i'm going to be talking about in this video and then they have a couple other free ones which is the cs50 for lawyers which is kind of niche and i don't know if anyone's going to be interested in that that's on my channel they also have an intro to artificial intelligence and a quantitative methods for biology which again is kind of niche and i don't know if anyone's going to be interested in that they cover other topics in programming but they're not free so i'm not really going to talk about any of those um unless people really want me to because they're kind of pricey and i don't know if anyone would be interested in that i kind of like talking about free resources that you can use that don't really cost you any money and these as you can see the price tags are pretty high on them but if you're interested in them you can check them out on their website which i'll link below but in this video i'm going to cover the intro to computer science and when you decide to go to the intro to computer science if you go through the harvard website and you click on take me to the course it's going to open up edx.org and edx is a learning platform that hosts a lot of different courses and programs so you'll have to create an edx account if you don't have one already um they have a lot of good free stuff on there so i recommend doing it now when you do sign in for the first time it's gonna prompt you here to pursue a verified certificate now you can go ahead and do this but i honestly think that you know while certificates may hold some value i personally don't think that they hold much value and i wouldn't go around trying to collect certificates just to you know have them on your resume because i don't know how much that will actually help you the real value from this course is actually the material that's in it and the stuff that you're going to build and the stuff that you're going to learn it's not the certificate that you're going to get for completing it so what we're going to do is we're going to actually go into audit discourse now with edx and harvard and other resources that you can find on edx many times they'll let you audit the course which means you're allowed to do the entire curriculum and you can complete it and go with their whole itinerary and everything that they have planned out because they do kind of section it off by different weeks and they have a schedule but you don't have to pay for a certificate so you can do that and just audit the course and get everything that the course has to offer so that's what we're gonna do now when you decide to audit the certificate it's gonna kind of give you an introduction to the program and it's gonna you know look at that they already discounted the cert by like 30 bucks just for logging in either way there's going to be a quick introduction here on this uh embedded youtube video that's going to tell you a little bit about the course and this is kind of how these courses are structured they're going to have a lot of the information here they're going to have the communities that are listed here on the side like their discord groups and all their different pages that you can go to to get information from and as you can see here they have all that information listed as well um we're gonna go ahead and just take a look at the actual curriculum here now you can see they have all of this for all of their curriculum let's just walk through each one of these and see what they have to offer for every week of the program so going into week zero because arrays start at zero remember that not one um they're gonna have lectures they're gonna have notes they're gonna have slides they're gonna have source code about everything they talk about they're also gonna have a transcript so you can read everything and then they're gonna have a problem so here's the video that contains the lecture and then you can watch this video which is probably just gonna be the first intro lecture i'm not gonna play any of this stuff i'm just gonna kind of walk through the curriculum you'll see and get an idea of how they structure everything and since it is a college program it's going to be very college-like and they're going to have a lot of lectures and they're going to have a lot of like homework for you to do so you can see this video here and then if i go back to the the written down curriculum you can see that they have a problem here that might be pretty simple and what it is is they're gonna have you download and install the latest version of chrome and then they're gonna submit scratch which i'm not totally sure what submit scratch is i'm not going to get too deep into every one of these but then you can see here they have the rest of their problems lined up for the cs50 according to weeks week one it seems like they have you learned c and this looks like it brought us into a different section for uh where it's going to be laying everything out and this actually looks a little bit better laid out than the previous area that i was in and here you can just kind of go through the same stuff you're going to have your lectures here you're going to have all your audio your notes for the lectures the slides that are included in all of the lectures the source code that's included in the lectures and everything you need for the lectures that they're going to be talking about and basically telling you everything that you need to do here's going to be your first lab that you're going to have to do and here's going to be kind of like a short area that kind of takes you to all the stuff that they are talking about and then you're going to have your next problem that you're going to work on and here's your next problem for the first week and now you're starting to see the pattern on how they set you up and how they have you work through all of this stuff sorry sorry i said first week what i meant is the second week again arrays start at zero not one so this would be the second week or the second set of problems for for week two and here's what they're gonna have you do they're gonna have you uh log log in to edx i'm assuming they're gonna have you reply to this thread and say hello introduce yourself submit this version of mario if you're feeling less comfortable and submit this version of mario if you're feeling more comfortable again i don't know what they're teaching in this i haven't gone through this curriculum in a very long time i'm pretty sure that the cs 50 intro to computer science it is not the same program or it has drastically changed over the years because i don't remember it being structured like this when i looked at this years ago so correct me if i'm wrong and if you think this hasn't changed much in the last four years let me know in the comments i really don't remember it being set up like this and and and not just because they updated the website but because of the curriculum that they're actually covering like i don't remember html and css and javascript in any of this when i did like look through this when i first tried to do it when i was learning how to code you know four years ago now um but as you can see you'll submit your problems and you'll get that all done and then you'll keep moving down through the different weeks you'll keep following the curriculum the same way um it's very much structured all the same you're gonna be doing this in this same exact pattern all the time it's going to be a lecture in a video that you're going to watch there's going to be slides there's going to be source code there's going to be some shorts that will kind of give you a rundown let's take a look at the shorts okay so the shorts are actually videos that kind of go into more detail on the topics that they're covering this is a really good course they really cover a lot of stuff and they really set you up very well um i know somebody had mentioned in the comments when i talked about the uh three resources to use and someone said well the intro to computer science isn't enough to get you a job yeah it might not be enough to get you a job but it's gonna give you enough resources to get on the path to getting a job because the person mentioned that it was a shorter course that the other web development with python and javascript was better if you wanted to get a job and i'm not i'm not denying them it mightn't be but the truth is that if you go through this curriculum you'll have enough tools in your toolbelt to build websites to start building your own projects to build a portfolio to really really start doing what it takes to you know be on track to get a job while free code camp and the odin project are like specifically set up to get you a job because they even cover you know landing a job and job interviews and all that stuff in their curriculum this course may not do that but man it gives you so much stuff that you should you should be on the right track and then you can find other resources that can help you with what you need to start looking for jobs or what you need to start being closer to getting a job but if you go through all of this stuff you're going to learn a lot so now we learn that the shorts are going to be more videos and more just more details on the stuff that they're covering and then they're gonna have a lab we can take a look at the lab and then in the lab they're gonna have you build scrabble apparently which is very intimidating even for me because i i don't even really know how i would start building a scrabble game and that would be something that would actually be really fun to take on and try to do but you can see here this is going to be your lab you're going to try to build scrabble they're going to give you a lot of implementation details and kind of how they want you to build it i it seems like they're having you build it in c and they're this is this is some hard stuff this you know now i'm starting to feel like this reminds me a little bit more of what i tried to do when i first started learning how to code and it was just way over my head and it was really hard but if you stick with this curriculum now i realize years after when i've learned how to code that you learn the most when you struggle through the hardest problems and even though they feel like they're impossible at times as long as you stick it out and you you get through them no matter how long it takes you just do them you'll learn so much but if you do them for so long that you start feeling discouraged it might be best to take a step back and maybe start with something a little bit easier if this in fact is a little bit too difficult for you you might be better off checking out free code camp or the odin project but with that said this is still just really amazing curriculum i mean it's a course from harvard that you can do completely for free online like how awesome is that right we live in a day and age where like me i would have never thought in a million years that i'd be able to do a course from harvard when i was growing up like that wasn't in my my books that wasn't gonna happen for me but you know in the age of the internet it's possible for anyone anywhere in the world and that's what's so cool that we have these kind of things at our disposal now like it's just it's just really really awesome so i you know i think i'm going to wrap this up because i don't want to get into every single bit of detail here because you kind of have the gist of what they're doing right you're going to have lectures they're going to have notes for you they're going to have the slides from the lectures that are going to like show you everything that they were showing in their slides they're going to show you the source code for all the different stuff that they're showing in the code on the lectures they're going to have the transcripts if you want to read it and then they're going to have their searches which are going to be or i'm sorry they're going to have the shorts which are going to be like more digestible smaller tidbits of information for the stuff that they talked about generally in the lectures so then you can do like a deep dive in all the topics and then you can just kind of repeat that throughout the weeks and i know that there's a community aspect to this i know that you gotta kind of have to get your stuff graded i'm pretty sure they still do that i again i haven't done an edx course in a while but i'm almost certain that there is some grading involved in this i don't know to what extent they grade you and how strict they are on whether you pass or not but really the benefit in this is completing it for yourself because man this stuff there's a lot of good stuff here honestly i remember i was talking to neil when i was doing a um a a live stream with james quick on his off zero uh channel and on twitch and there was a bunch of us there and neil brought it up that you know going through the harvard cs50 after you've kind of like self-taught a little bit and you've been coding for a while and you go back to it and you try to work through it and you realize how much good information is on here because really there's a this is jam-packed like they cover algorithms they cover memory management they cover data structures and they cover different languages and they cover python and sql and and so much cool stuff that that i really am considering that maybe i might try to do this if i have some time but i'm just so busy but it kind of going through it i'm like oh man i wonder how i would do now four years later that i know a little bit more you know i i know a lot more now than than i did when i was first learning and this would be actually a really challenging and fun thing for me to do um but then we can just finish up here and we can kind of just look at a little bit of the rest of the stuff and we can look at their final project and see what the final project is so it seems like for the final project they want you to build your own piece of software they want you to take whatever language that you want and they say that you're welcome to utilize um other infrastructures outside of the cs50 ide and all they ask is that you build something of interest to you that you solve an actual problem with that can impact the community or that you can change the world with so this is pretty cool i guess the final project is just to build something and they kind of give you a few ideas of what you can build here just to kind of you know if you're if you're struggling with ideas i know i struggle with ideas all the time and then they they give you a getting started here kind of what what they're you know kind of breaking it down a little bit for you to to help you through the process a bit and let's see what else so then the rest of it is going to be like how to submit your project and all that so it does look like they're i don't know if they're gonna review it but they might um again i don't know what kind of validation that they have for completion of projects and completion of homework it's been a long time since i've done an edx course and i'm just not sure to be honest with you but if you know let me know in the comments if you if you've done some of this or if you've done another edx course and you remember actually being graded and having you know feedback from the stuff that you would put in and and whatnot so that's pretty much it that covers a lot of the cs50 that covers pretty much everything that that i think i wanted to talk about one thing before we leave that i mentioned earlier in the video two was if you are interested in me talking about any of these the same way that i talked about the cs50 and kind of just walking through some of the stuff that they offer in their curriculum for these programs such as the intro to game development or web development with python and javascript please let me know in the comments i can do that i have a feeling that they're going to be very much structured just like the cs50 i think this is a great course this is a great way to start learning this is structured like a college program it's going to be probably better than most boot camps that you're doing online right now because all the curriculum is from harvard professors and it's stuff that they actually teach at the university so it doesn't get any better than that i really can't see how a boot camp can compete with that other than offering you people to talk with and if you join their discord for the cs50 you can probably find a lot of people there that are willing to help yeah it might not be the same as having a direct mentor but i'm pretty sure that it's a good supplement for it especially if you're going to save thousands of dollars so if you're one of those people that's on the fence about signing up for a boot camp and you don't know where to start learning online check out the harvard cs50 as your first option and give that a try or check out free code camp or the odin project or just do a quick google search and look around for other free resources and there's a lot of stuff that you can use that'll get you right on track that's well structured that doesn't cost a lot of money or that's completely free with all that said if you enjoyed this video if you found value in it please make sure to hit that like button subscribe to my channel if you want to you know get more information on learning how to code or tips and tricks on how to become a self-taught programmer and me talking about random stuff that might give you some motivation and whatnot all right thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Dorian Develops

Views: 73,597

Keywords: self taught programmer, self taught web developer, self taught developer, self taught software engineer, programmer, web developer, developer, software engineer, programming, web development, development, software engineering, learn to code, how to code, code, coding, web dev, self taught, web, engineer, engineering

Id: He4jqZ2EjrE

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021