Developing the basics: Programming myself post twelve
CS50 review part II
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Finally!
I have finished the CS50 course. The future is there for the taking. I won’t lie this was a big undertaking. I think though overall this was a really good course to get through as it covers a lot of computer science principles, helps you to get familiar with some of the most useful developer technologies and makes you think harder about computer programing and computers and what is happening under-the-hood. There are a lot of directions to go from here and things to build on, though there is still a lot to do with Python I am definitely not finished yet.
What to expect
This is a huge commitment of your time; I would say that each week will take about 10 hours to get through. So it is some hard study, and you need to make sure you keep to a schedule as it is easy to put things off. I didn’t manage to do all the problem sets, to be honest, and I think in reality these are going to give you the biggest gains, but the lectures and examples will provide you with an incredible understanding of what is going on and why in your computer, but the coding you are only going to learn from the practice with the problem sets as just following lectures and thinking you can code won’t work.
The best bits
The Shorts are also incredibly interesting for an overview of the different concepts covered in the lectures. The concepts and technologies covered are great too as you get introduced to really interesting things and shown how to use them together with each other, for example, it is possible by the end to make a website which has a back-end which will react to the things you do and can store information. But what is better is that you can understand all the things going on and how they are getting their information and reacting with each other.
Drawbacks
So my original plan was to learn Python, this has deviated somewhat with taking this course as now I know a bit of C, Linux command line, HTML, JavaScript, SQL, JQuery, JSON, Flask, CSS, BootStrap, machine learning, image recognition, and generally how the internet works. But I think all this is actually worth learning if you want to become a computer programmer, the course also leads you through the process of finding out more information for yourself. There is a lot to get through; you have to take it week-by-week doing all the extra work and problem sets to get the most out of it. It doesn’t show you everything about each concept, but it does give you a foundation which you can build on right away.
Week 5 – Data structures
Week 6 – the internet
Week 7 – Machine Learning
Week 8 – Python
Week 9 – SQL
Week 10 – JavaScript
Now we are done with this course it is time to get back on track with the Python learning and getting through the next course “Adaptive Python” from the Stepik platform using the PyCharm Edu.
“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself. – Karen Blixen
