missing-semester VS computer-science

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education Learn CLI, Git, and other real dev tools.

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.

There are a lot of great self-study resources for computer science. I've seen https://github.com/ossu/computer-science before and thought it looked like a good way to slowly make your way though a typical CS curriculum.

There is a Discord server for the OSSU computer science cirriculum that is pretty active. https://github.com/ossu/computer-science

For a well-rounded CS knowledge you might want to look into OSSU, which is designed to meet the requirements for univerisity CS courses.

There’s also a compiled CS curriculum here: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science.

OP I hate to double comment and be "that guy who learned to code without going to college who MUST he did it the correct way" cause fuck "that guy". He's annoying, and he never shuts up, and I try really hard not to be that guy.... But I wanna provide some extra reasons I feel you should stay away from Code Academy. And as I said before, not because they're bad courses, so let me be that guy just for a brief moment. In addition to random Youtubers straight up having high quality courses that are much more update date, they often have supplemental tutorials on niche things that aren't covered in a "101 course". But even then, maybe the idea of a certificate on your resume appeals to you... Well, turns out there's more "academic" courses online you can do to get more of those things that self-taught dumbasses like me aren't as strong with because we skipped the "academic" part of learning..... If that's what makes Code Academy appealing (which I don't think they even go over much.... but still)... then here's 2 things I'd look at before pulling out your wallet. Here's Harvards entire introduction to Computer Science courses provided for anyone to take for free (you can pay for a certificate, but its straight up $0.00 to take the classes) Heres a github repo for an Open Source University that a ton of devs have curated to give a simulated full degree program If you want to focus hardcore on being a Web Developer and are frustrated by there not being tutorials that show you exactly how to handle every step from "there's no website on my computer" to "holy shit I made a website", then here you go The Odin Project is an Open Source answer to your cries of frustration. It has curriculum paths that do exactly that. The goal is to go from zero programming knowledge to fully employable as a web developer (by skill level at least, obviously you'll need to build stuff and build a resume)

That said, I'm a software developer and I don't see any point in the distinction of calling someone a software or computer engineer based on education (with the exception of electronics engineers that work on hardware, but here I'm talking about software). A BSc or BEng in computer science or software development can give you a headstart but nothing that can't be self taught and in hiring I've been shocked by many postgrad engineers that couldn't answer simple questions and were outdone by self taught engineers. Make no mistake though - education is required (e.g. you're not going to learn data structures and algorithms through osmosis), but it doesn't have to be formalised as a degree.