Hi, I’m a first year CS student and this 3 month period of vacations I want to follow a good free course on programming. If it’s possible, I also want to learn how is the process in which a code written in a text editor can become an executable with it’s GUI in the operating system (currently using Linux), because I really have no idea how that works.
Browsing the web for it have become overwhelming and I’m finding trouble in deciding what to follow, and I also need some order in order to learn things.
I would really appreciate if you can tell me if you know any course that meets this requirements.
or, you know, touch some grass and don’t burn out while waiting for the courses to start
If you want to learn how programming languages can go from text in a file to something a computer can process, I recommend either:
Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation
or
If you want to know how a computer processes the information, I recommend:
If those are too much for your level of programming knowledge, I suggest one of the following to get up to speed:
A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing
or
I think there are good free online courses, like Harvard’s CS 50 course. I’ve also heard of OpenCourseWare. I haven’t used either of them personally, though.
Open Courseware is excellent so far! I’ve done their intro to C (as a refresher) and Intro to Algorithms courses. It’s definitely worth the time.
Do you know what classes you are going to be taking? If so, fnd the syllabus and take note of the topics and the text, if one is mentioned. See if you can find any mention of material your school may have used previously and get yourself a copy. Find the topics in the book and work through the exercises as you please.
Download SICP (find with search engine), read through it and do the exercises.
I’m not sure that can be completed in 3 months by most people on their own. But I think it’s a great option anyway. Probably best to use Emacs (Edwin) in doing so.
If OP chooses this option, I like this HTML5 version the best: https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/
It’s fine, just make much progress as you can in the 3 months. It will be good prep for a CS program. It’s also ok to read ahead and so on.
I recommend taking a look at https://roadmap.sh/. It’s not a course, it’s a website with several “roadmaps” for learning languages or specific fields. There’s plenty of docs and it’s easy to follow!
Read through the HTML5 spec if you want to do anything frontend related. Yes, it can be boring at times, but using a TTS extension for your browser helps a lot.
It’ll teach you which HTML5 tags exist, which attributes exist for each tag, which tag goes within which tag, etc. Very helpful if you want to actually learn an up-to-date HTML5.
It will provide a very good fundamental knowledge before you start learning whatever popular JS framework exists in a few years.
Depends on which programming language you want to learn.
https://www.w3schools.com/ is a good resource for the basics in some of the most used programming languages and a good reference for looking up how things work.
Most learning of programming is IMHO learning by doing. And by breaking things.
Think of a program you want to make (or one you want to replicate, just for learning purposes) and set this as your goal. It doesn’t need to be perfect, optimized or even fully functional. Just grab a hot beverage of your choice, sit down and try.
There are plenty of (sometimes even free) books with examples how to use the programming language of your choice. If you want to go that way, again, grab a hot beverage of your choice and start reading.
w3schools is much improved over what it was originally, but it never became a top quality resource (even if you limited your search to “popular” and free). Also it’s very web centric and OP is looking for something that’s more fundamental.
