Day 30: The Wall And Cs50

CS50 IS A SERIES OF HARVARD LECTURES

CS50 is a series of Harvard lectures that are very much worth the Ivy League brand. I watched this later in my career and I was like, "Damn. So that's why we do the shit that we do." It's a good place to start understanding the concepts and the "why" we do things in computer science.

When you hit that first wall, take a step back, and go into the theory. Now is the best time, and it's going to really push the turbo button on your education. When you're done with this lecture series, you're going to have a better grasp of why you're doing all the stuff you're doing. It's going to have a fucking point, basically.

24 HOURS OF TOTAL HARVARD LECTURES

The reason you're watching this now is for two reasons:

1. If you start with this from Day 1, you'll have no idea what's going on at all.
2. You're going to need a little mental break to understand why you're learning what you're learning and how it all connects.

Take all the courses (CS50) (https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2023/).

(Even the courses like C, which you won't learn in this curriculum. C is a low level, static typed, compiled language, so it's… pretty different than Python. Even though some of the syntax and libraries seem similar.)

It's 11 different sections, so I'd say maybe watch it over 22 days.

Treat it like school. Take notes. Write stuff down. Go back and try to understand why you wrote stuff down.

Then, hear me out… watch it all again, with your notes as a companion.

It also comes with notes, so reference the notes that are available on the course.

Seriously this is all gold.

I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH

There isn't a "most important" part of this, but I really think it's valuable to understand computer science theory, and "why" things work the way they do in programming. Professor Malan teaches at Harvard because he's one of the best in the world at teaching computer science ideas, theories, and concepts.

Would you still learn Python and SQL without watching this? Yes. But I added this in because it's going to give you a better idea for self-guided learning. What you need to learn, know next, etc.