cs-topics VS missing-semester

Also I wish the juniors on my team would do this book. It has helped me so much. Just not directly.

Btw, if you enjoyed the book you might like this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Randal...

I'd love to have the time to work through it as I think the level of in depth knowledge it provides would be the best thing for me as a programmer.

I found it through:

https://teachyourselfcs.com/

Thanks for the suggestion! I'm following the website https://teachyourselfcs.com/ , which also mentions this course. It looks very good so far.

https://teachyourselfcs.com/ and/or https://csprimer.com/courses/

Basically, prioritize books/textbooks over tutorials/guides/papers until you've mastered the material in undergraduate textbooks.

https://teachyourselfcs.com/

A subset of the resources listed there are probably the most pragmatic for the topics you asked, but you might discover that you're interested in other areas of CS as you slowly work through them. I think it's ok to nibble away at exercises while juggling your family and work obligations.

* Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - SICP. If the book doesn't necessarily click right away, doing a subset of the Scheme exercises are still worthwhile.

I never formally studied computer science and didn't feel it held me back as a web developer. I did some easy exercises on LeetCode occasionally and read about data structures and algorithms when I had free time. However, it was never serious, and the lack of consistent practice prevented me from building a strong foundation. But with my current goals, this area has become very important. After some research, I found this set of resources at teachyourselfcs.com, and it seems to be exactly what I need. For practice, I plan to choose challenges from LeetCode or a similar platform.

Yes, the fundamentals don't change, but this blog is just affiliate link farming and the 40 (!) books it recommends includes a lot of non-fundamental rubbish.

Here's a much better list of around 7 books: https://teachyourselfcs.com/.

But a software developer is not a software engineer, and I'll have to work on the side to make up for the holes in the developer cursus. I turned to reddit to look for recommandations, and I'm quite enthusiast with the TeachYourselfCS learning track - which I started along the Java lessons.

HtDP [0], CS50x [1], and whatever strikes your interest from teachyourselfcs [2], in that order.

Also highly recommend the book for nand2Tetris after CS50.

[0] https://htdp.org/2023-8-14/Book/index.html

[1] https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-science/harvard-universit...

[2] https://teachyourselfcs.com/

The solution is avoiding crappy UIs designed to "help those who do not know how to use a computer" keeping them in their ignorance to exploit them and damn teaching IT. The MIT Missing Semester of Your CS Education https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ should be mandatory for high schools in 2025. People than will choose not to buy services but contents, and instead of watching Netflix with multiple accounts in a family they'll simply milk a public catalog passing through their own recommendation engine/scoring system, downloading what they want and keeping it locally on their own storage having bought the bits, not the service. With the side effect of much reducing the enormous consumption of bandwidth and energy we have today to keep internet up for the old new mainframe model named "the cloud".

The push toward {fog,edge}-computing, new distributed LLM proposals like BrianknowsAI's DCI Network clearly show this trend. We need moldable systems not cages.

The recommendations in this thread so far do suggest a lot of nice books - CS:APP and SICP - but given your description of previous struggles with more academic stuff, along with the request for "practical examples or projects", I'm not sure they are right for you. By all means take a look, but don't be discouraged if they don't fit what you're after. An algorithm book with a somewhat different tone that you might check out is Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual. I've been reading Ousterhout's A Philosophy of Software Design recently and that might also be something that would interest you.

However, I might suggest that books and theoretical knowledge are not the main things you need right away. I moved into software engineering after a long time in science. I had done plenty of coding, and had a pretty decent amount of theoretical knowledge, but there was still quite a bit of practical adjustment. I really like Rzor's suggestion of https://missing.csail.mit.edu to start with.

Beyond that, I think maybe I would find some specific codebases that you'd like to understand better, and start with reading more of those. I feel like that's often better than books for picking up idiomatic usage and patterns in given domains. As you hit specific barriers, I think it will be much easier to pick up the intrinsic motivation to dip back into theoretical knowledge at that point.

It is more than just that. I used to recommend a lot the MIT's Missing Semester of your CS Education https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ to people that is not familiar with some topics at work.

The missing semester of your cs education

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

You mentioned having issues with accessory concepts so perhaps this might help: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/. There's also a chapter on git

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ is a good way to pass the Dec-Jan break if you want to prep for CS2030S + some more general stuff.

Reflecting a little bit more I don't think it was replit's fault, per-say. But that change should have been made together with a larger adjustment to the program. Like adding a class/unit in the style of [the missing semester](https://missing.csail.mit.edu/) to make sure people came away with a good range of intuitions.

From MJD's post: I think CS curricula should have a class that focuses specifically on these issues, on the matter of how do you actually write software?

But they never do.

FWIW, MIT's "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education" attempts to deal with this lack, though, even there, it's an unofficial course taught between terms, during MIT's IAP -- Independent Activities Period[1] -- and not an actual CS course.

[0] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditions_and_student_activit...