CS50/Academical Courses Experience

Also, if you take enough classes through Mircrosoft Virtual Academy, you’ll start hearing this saying a lot:

“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Anyway, I started the course several months ago and never got back to it. Put that on my to-do list.

I’ve finished CS50 couple of days ago, it took me about 2 months, but I’m not sure if I would recommend it to a person who wants to be JS developer, since I wrote like 15 lines of JS through entire course. Someone above said that is good if you want to learn programming and not web development and I can totally agree. I guess it is good introduction course if you want to learn C or Python.

There are many questionable steps in “Get job ready” guide, like reading YDKJS Asynchronous Programming and ES6 even before you have a little practical experience with code, or being ready to do React and Node projects just by reading official docs (?!), but that’s just my opinion.

For me the best way to actually learn something is to combine some good video courses with doing FCC projects (frontend, backend and react) and reading books along the way just to gain more solid and clear understanding.

edit: sorry for digression and replying one month old post

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That’s the best description of CS50 ever. I made it through 4 weeks before returning to FCC to start the Javascript section. Even that little bit of CS50 gave be a good foundation for basic programming patterns that have made the JS algorithms much easier than they would have been otherwise. I killed myself doing the exercises in CS50 and it was worth. I may eventually go back to it. We’ll see.

I have listened to all of the lectures of the course. While doing that alone I had a great experience with it. The content is great. Lecture’s are very informative, detailed. When it comes to the problem sets there are all sorts of things to help out “Shorts” on the video, other little things like tips, or like our guide on FCC but without giving you the direct code solutions.
One thing I’ll say about the course, I highly suggest reading the materials they suggest for “additional reading” had I not read “C++ for absolute beginners” I dont think I would have had such a fundamental grasp on what I know now.

Also CS50 will teach you the absolute fundamentals in computing, a must have in my opinion, because funnily enough you will get asked questions regarding sorting algorithms and binary search tree’s in some developer positions. Also keep in mind this is Computer science 50, not web development 50, so they focus on more lower level concepts to start out, then near the end of the course there is some web development topics, They also have a complete separate course on Web development. I will update with link when I find it.

Edit: Links for Webdevelopment for Business Professionals. There is a whole series this is just 1 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8rXkvpKpG8

And the open courseware is for CS 75 “Building dynamic websites” http://cs75.tv/2012/summer/

Once you solve a problem in C, solving the same problem in JavaScript will be child’s play. So from that point of view, yes CS50 is definitely worth it.

But for me, the most important and maybe one of just the few takeaways from the entire course was C$50 Finance pset, where I got some picture of how full stack web app is built.

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Im on week 2 of the CS50 course. It’s kinda confusing to have to keep up with both C (from CS50) and JS (from FCC) if you are a beginner like me, but I believe it’s worth it.