Ask HN: How do I choose the right resource to learn CS fundamentals?
You need to narrow down what your goal is.<p>Trying to learn computer science is like trying to learn sports. Swimming and tennis have very little in common and you can spend years trying every sport and never becoming good at any of them (what traditional cs education does)<p>If your goal is to get a job, your best bet is web development or mobile dev.<p>The big picture is we have CPUs that have instructions. Instructions boil down to moving data to&#x2F;from someplace and manipulation of data.<p>Moving is how monitors display stuff, data gets stored on disk etc. Moving is how a program gets loaded and executed.<p>Manipulation is how you get math operations. Programming boils down to math operations and conditionals (if this, then that, else something else)<p>Math operations have a few basic types for performance reasons - floats, ints, etc.<p>Because math operations on the CPU have types, programming languages have types. Because CPUs have conditional operations, programming languages have operations. See the pattern? Programming languages are just conveniences on top of the language the CPU provides (called assembly).<p>The most popular &#x27;low level&#x27; language is C. C gives you functions and the smallest set of data types you can get away with. The big deal here is organizing code into functions. Functions allow re-use and programming is all about doing the least amount of work possible by the programmer to achieve a task, in the shortest amount of time and memory use possible.<p>The study of shortest amount of code to achieve the fastest result with the least amount of memory use is algorithms.<p>To achieve fast results with least memory used, you want a language that gives you access to memory manipulation directly. This is why C is still king for anything performance critical.<p>If you don&#x27;t care for performance much, Java the language is king of corporate software and all Android software too. It handles memory for you and your types are clever - you don&#x27;t need to say how big an array you want when creating it, you just create one and it gets magically re-sized behind the scenes for you as you add elements in. All modern languages have clever types and ways of helping manage memory for you. This is to make programming more newbie-friendly and theoretically to lower the number of bugs, at the cost of performance and memory use.<p>Phew, so we have CPUs, C and Java. Now where do we typically store data and how do we display it?<p>Data is stored in databases. Databases mere mortals use are all SQL databases - the most popular and robust being Postgres. Learn what an index is and why it helps stuff run faster. Learn joins and one-to-many and many-to-many. Build a photo-sharing site with user registration - this&#x27;ll cover needing to know all the basics.<p>Oh, to build the site, you&#x27;ll need to display it. You have 3 options - web, ios or android. I&#x27;d recommend web because it&#x27;s the easiest of the 3 and there are tons of excellent resources to learn from.<p>It is extremely easy to get bogged down in libraries such as &#x27;react&#x27; and all the rest. It is extremely easy to get bogged down in new Javascript features. Stick with the basics! Stick with simple html&#x2F;css and flexbox for layout. Use node with the most popular and simple web framework as a web server. Use the simplest library to talk to the database and write SQL, don&#x27;t use ORM because you need to learn SQL and&#x27;ll be around for the next 50 years - your ORM won&#x27;t.<p>Phew, you&#x27;ve spent about 6 months and have built a photo sharing site. You know html&#x2F;css, some javascript, a web server framework, how to store stuff in a database.<p>You&#x27;re another 3-6 months away from getting a job as a web developer. You&#x27;ll need to learn react or whatever other junk framework of the year is most popular these days. You&#x27;ll then be plunged into a world of mediocre software and writing code for projects that make no sense, with deadlines that make even less sense. There&#x27;ll be a lot of meetings, incompetence and your posture will suffer.<p>The pay is good however, and it <i>should</i> double within the first 2-5 years if not triple. Switch jobs every year and try to do contract work as soon as possible - it pays way better.<p>This is the outline for going from 0 to hero, if getting a job is your goal. If you don&#x27;t want to end up working on projects of questionable importance for the rest of your career and you want to build software that will drive the next car, operate the next robot, help us go to Mars etc - you should simply attend a good University. There is no shortcut and you&#x27;ll avoid wasting hundreds if not thousands of hours chasing your own tail reading tutorials written by people who learned programming 2 years ago themselves.<p>You&#x27;ll meet other smart people and you may even want to get a Masters and a PhD. Oh, you may get hired by a top company if you&#x27;re good and the pay there is great, and that&#x27;s where you&#x27;ll get to do great work. They care about degrees and which University you went to, don&#x27;t believe anyone who says otherwise.<p>Self-learning CS is only for the crazy ones, or those who want a high paying job quickly, are smart and don&#x27;t care what they work on.<p>My 2 cents of course, having gone the self-learning route myself many years ago :)<p>Oh, one last thing - if you go the self-learning route, you <i>need</i> a friend who&#x27;s a good established programmer to answer your questions for 5-10 min everyday. I don&#x27;t know if there are services online that do this or if you know somebody but this is absolutely critical to avoid wasting your time without knowing it, which is inevitable but you want to minimize it.<p>Now that I think of it, if you go to University, you absolutely want a real programmer too, to know which courses to simply get a passing grade on, and which to focus on, depending on your ambitions.