Ask HN: Possible to self teach CS/programming using only books/hobby projects?

1 points by optbuild 2 years ago | 4 comments

Is it really possible to learn computer science and related math on your own with the help of books and building projects on your own? Assuming you have rudimentary programming knowledge in any imperative language like Python or C, etc.

I am aware of guides like teachyourselfCS for someone who is a developer or programmer already. But has anyone really benefited from those guides?

If you were in this kind of a situation which books and or hobby projects have really helped you?

PaulHoule 2 years ago |

I really enjoyed the Python course at Hackerrank. I knew a lot of Python already but it deepened my knowledge and I felt like there was little friction and I was having fun all the time. I did some other courses at Hackerrank and they were good too but not as good.

I self-taught a lot about compilers and related technology in the 2010s, a lot of that came from having projects where knowing about parsers was helpful (e.g. like that project where we were analyzing the results we got from arangodb and we were getting back columns in scrambled orders and I wrote something that parsed the query and could usually determine the intended order of the columns from the query and would feed them in that order into pandas, or that project where I was trying to parse mediawiki markup and later learned that it was easier to just parse the HTML)

turtleyacht 2 years ago |

Yes, anything computable has its analog in mathematics. Don't forget not only books and guides; the compiler is also a teacher.

What we gain by not scribbling proofs and peering at it, and peeking at the answers in our self-doubt and frustration, is the computer refuses to execute statements that are not syntactically correct.

With data structures and the standard libraries, you have your own model of the universe; express the ideas in code and test them: after adding to the collection, does it report back the size increased by 1?

By yourself, the hardest is finding something to program. To that, I would say try to solve your own problems.

Create a quiz app with staggered repetition. Step through your programs with a debugger. Look at the generated assembly.

In a vacuum, gcc on a Chromebook is a ticket to infinite possibilities.

simne 2 years ago |

I think, now books only approach unfortunately impossible, I have study some things by videos. But books+videos, I think absolutely real, if student could self-learn and have good enough mathematics background.

For example, I think very real to switch from university electronics to CS/programming, even when electronics don't learn some math (needed in crypto).

Doctor-R 2 years ago |

Start with one or more of Harvard's intro CS courses: https://www.classcentral.com/report/harvard-cs50-guide/ Then you need a lot of data structure / algorithms work.

There are free online CS courses at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. Computer Science is a huge field, with many specializations. Computer Science is the study of concepts, programming is the implementation.