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Ask HN: What's the best free course in your area of expertise?

154 points by Fervicus 4y ago

Let's compile a list of the best free courses on various subjects. Video courses are preferred; it's nice to have a backlog of videos to watch when the opportunity arises, like while flying.

joshxyz 4y ago
When I was in high school and college I used to watch Dana Mosely's math videos. He got the best explanations I've ever found. https://coolmathguy.com/ https://coolmathguy.com/
chestertn 4y ago
Stephen Boyd’s course on Convex Optimization https://see.stanford.edu/Course/EE364A https://see.stanford.edu/Course/EE364A
- wklm 4y ago
  thank you!
transpute 4y ago
Xeno Kovah's courses on low-level systems architecture, security, firmware, reversing & vulnerabilities, https://p.ost2.fyi https://p.ost2.fyi "OST2: A new way to grow security talent for open source projects", https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/ost2/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/ost2/ > .. he ended up working for Apple. There he worked on securing all the lesser-known firmwares on Macs and peripherals - everything from 3rd party GPUs to SecureBoot for monitors! He worked on the x86-side of the T2 SecureBoot architecture, and his final project was leading the M1 SecureBoot architecture - being directly responsible for designing a system that could provide iOS-level security, while still allowing customer choice to trust arbitrary non-Apple code such as Linux bootloaders. He left Apple in Dec 2020 after the M1 Macs shipped, so he could work full time on Open Security Training.
odessacubbage 4y ago
Modern Colour Theory For Traditional And Digital Painting Media by Dr David. J.C. Briggs, >http://www.huevaluechroma.com http://www.huevaluechroma.com
- aguilonius 4y ago
  Thanks so much for posting my website here! Who knew hackers were so interested in colour! Someone just suggested adding paid courses as well, so I hope it's okay if I add that I also give a live online colour course that's not too expensive and has a lot of new material I've produced since finishing the main part of The Dimensions of Colour in 2017. There's a course outline here and a form if you want more information https://sites.google.com/site/djcbriggs/tmct https://sites.google.com/site/djcbriggs/tmct
enos_feedler 4y ago
I would like people to add paid courses. I don’t mind paying $500+ if it’s really well done
- than3 4y ago
  I agree with the sentiment that you get what you pay for, but there is so much market fluff that most of the time true gems aren't recognized, and 90% of what you see, a true professional in that area would rank, hard down. That being said, valuable material shouldn't be available for free. You should have to exchange something for it because the author put in work and expertise to make it happen, and they won't be able to provide more or support it with a price tag of free. People have to have some incentive and be able to offset costs. Algorithms often also control what you see so even lists like this are quickly corrupted. It truly is an 'Anathem' world now.
- chestertn 4y ago
  Any paid course that you recommend?
  - enos_feedler 4y ago
    Any of rickhanson.net courses. Genuine guy and his heart is really into helping people learn to change their mind.
- loveparade 4y ago
  In my experience there is almost an inverse relationship between course quality and whether it's paid or not. People who are experts in their fields typically don't need to make money from selling educational materials. They make enough money in their field of expertise, e.g. by being a researcher or professor. The reason they publish educational materials is typically to improve their public image or become a bit more famous, and they want as many people as possible to have access. On the other hand, paid courses (think Udemy and stuff like that) are often made by people whose goal is to put in the minimum effort plus some marketing to sell a course. They are not experts in the field, and don't need to be, because marketing is more important. These courses end up being shallow low-quality fluff.
abraxas 4y ago
Even if it seems like it's outdated somewhat due to the breakneck progress of machine learning in the past few years the legendary Cs231n is still the course to start your ML journey with. Especially as taught by Andrej Karpathy. You should be able to find recordings of it on YouTube. Make sure you get the ones from Karpathy years at Stanford. As brilliant as Andrej is as a ML practitioner, he is an absolute world class mastermind at teaching this stuff.
imakwana 4y ago
MIT course series on Computation Structures: https://computationstructures.org/ https://computationstructures.org/
novafacing 4y ago
pwn.college from the folks at ASU SEFCOM is by a significant margin the best comprehensive binary exploitation training you can get. There are video lessons from some of the top professors and graduate (and undergraduate) TAs, CTF players, and more alongside a massive suite of hands on practice and a community for discussion and learning. Video training sessions: https://youtube.com/@pwncollege https://youtube.com/@pwncollege Challenges: pwn.college Discord: https://pwn.college/discord https://pwn.college/discord
muzani 4y ago
Android/Kotlin course on Udacity, by Google: https://www.udacity.com/course/developing-android-apps-with-kotlin--ud9012 https://www.udacity.com/course/developing-android-apps-with-... This one is slightly out of date, but it's great, something I'd happily pay $300 or so for. The value is heavily subsidized by Google. I have taught week-long Android professional certifications and this does a lot better than most of them out there.
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  Wish there was an excellent and advanced Android/Kotlin course.
  - muzani 4y ago
    How advanced would you like it? This covers a good amount of material past beginner, like coroutines and viewmodels, but I can recommend some (paid) books if there's a particular topic.
    - crossroadsguy 4y ago
      Let’s say advanced Kotlin and Coroutines etc. More importantly I would love some course that challenges a senior developer in not only impl. coding but also in architecture and design beyond the famous fad architecture in Android world as of now
      - muzani 4y ago
        Sorry, just noticed this. Arguably, there's only really one proper architecture today: UI (View+ViewModels), Data, and possibly Domain in between. Most of the others seem to have more cons than pros. This is a great guide on architectures, more up to date than most articles on the topic: https://developer.android.com/topic/architecture https://developer.android.com/topic/architecture The previous linked tutorial covers coroutines well enough to do things with it. If you want to go further, I'd recommend figuring out how to combine Kotlin Flow with Compose; neither Compose nor Flow really shine without the other. Sadly can't find tutorials on this either. Planning to open source some templates some time this year.
tester756 4y ago
Maybe not my expertise, but it's rare to see this kind of content so if you want to learn something like: PCI/CXL/USB/x86/ARM/DRAM/SAS/AHCI/NVM/SATA/Virtualization/UEFI/Thunderbolt then I've seen this https://www.mindshare.com/ https://www.mindshare.com/ being recommended
quickthrower2 4y ago
ReactJS: https://scrimba.com/learn/learnreact https://scrimba.com/learn/learnreact Also just started the free FastAI course, seems very good so far
orhanerday 4y ago
CS50 is nice.
rg111 4y ago
* Machine Learning, Andrew Ng, Coursera * Practical Deep Learning for Coders, fast.ai * Mathematics for Machine Learning Specialization, Imperial College London * Deep Learning Specialization, Andrew Ng, Coursera
alin23 4y ago
On building iOS, iPadOS and macOS apps using the latest version of SwiftUI: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCIl409gNBsqKTe https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCI... Helped me a lot in building the apps I have published on https://lowtechguys.com/ https://lowtechguys.com/
LeegleechN 4y ago
Justinguitar.com for guitar.
BlameKaneda 4y ago
This Tour of Heroes tutorial can teach you just about everything that you need to know about Angular, and it can be completed in a pretty short amount of time. https://angular.io/tutorial/tour-of-heroes https://angular.io/tutorial/tour-of-heroes
andrei_says_ 4y ago
Kevin Powell on CSS - YouTube Jen Simmons on CSS grid - YouTube
fuy 4y ago
CMU's Andy Pavlo database courses and related webinars https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOiDTTqpfnWFf https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOi... https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOiDTTqpfnWFf https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOi...

154 points by Fervicus 4y ago

Let's compile a list of the best free courses on various subjects. Video courses are preferred; it's nice to have a backlog of videos to watch when the opportunity arises, like while flying.

joshxyz 4y ago

When I was in high school and college I used to watch Dana Mosely's math videos. He got the best explanations I've ever found. https://coolmathguy.com/ https://coolmathguy.com/

chestertn 4y ago

Stephen Boyd’s course on Convex Optimization https://see.stanford.edu/Course/EE364A https://see.stanford.edu/Course/EE364A

wklm 4y ago
thank you!

transpute 4y ago

Xeno Kovah's courses on low-level systems architecture, security, firmware, reversing & vulnerabilities, https://p.ost2.fyi https://p.ost2.fyi "OST2: A new way to grow security talent for open source projects", https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/ost2/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/ost2/ > .. he ended up working for Apple. There he worked on securing all the lesser-known firmwares on Macs and peripherals - everything from 3rd party GPUs to SecureBoot for monitors! He worked on the x86-side of the T2 SecureBoot architecture, and his final project was leading the M1 SecureBoot architecture - being directly responsible for designing a system that could provide iOS-level security, while still allowing customer choice to trust arbitrary non-Apple code such as Linux bootloaders. He left Apple in Dec 2020 after the M1 Macs shipped, so he could work full time on Open Security Training.

odessacubbage 4y ago

Modern Colour Theory For Traditional And Digital Painting Media by Dr David. J.C. Briggs, >http://www.huevaluechroma.com http://www.huevaluechroma.com

aguilonius 4y ago
Thanks so much for posting my website here! Who knew hackers were so interested in colour! Someone just suggested adding paid courses as well, so I hope it's okay if I add that I also give a live online colour course that's not too expensive and has a lot of new material I've produced since finishing the main part of The Dimensions of Colour in 2017. There's a course outline here and a form if you want more information https://sites.google.com/site/djcbriggs/tmct https://sites.google.com/site/djcbriggs/tmct

enos_feedler 4y ago

I would like people to add paid courses. I don’t mind paying $500+ if it’s really well done

than3 4y ago
I agree with the sentiment that you get what you pay for, but there is so much market fluff that most of the time true gems aren't recognized, and 90% of what you see, a true professional in that area would rank, hard down. That being said, valuable material shouldn't be available for free. You should have to exchange something for it because the author put in work and expertise to make it happen, and they won't be able to provide more or support it with a price tag of free. People have to have some incentive and be able to offset costs. Algorithms often also control what you see so even lists like this are quickly corrupted. It truly is an 'Anathem' world now.
chestertn 4y ago
Any paid course that you recommend?
- enos_feedler 4y ago
  Any of rickhanson.net courses. Genuine guy and his heart is really into helping people learn to change their mind.
loveparade 4y ago
In my experience there is almost an inverse relationship between course quality and whether it's paid or not. People who are experts in their fields typically don't need to make money from selling educational materials. They make enough money in their field of expertise, e.g. by being a researcher or professor. The reason they publish educational materials is typically to improve their public image or become a bit more famous, and they want as many people as possible to have access. On the other hand, paid courses (think Udemy and stuff like that) are often made by people whose goal is to put in the minimum effort plus some marketing to sell a course. They are not experts in the field, and don't need to be, because marketing is more important. These courses end up being shallow low-quality fluff.

abraxas 4y ago

Even if it seems like it's outdated somewhat due to the breakneck progress of machine learning in the past few years the legendary Cs231n is still the course to start your ML journey with. Especially as taught by Andrej Karpathy. You should be able to find recordings of it on YouTube. Make sure you get the ones from Karpathy years at Stanford. As brilliant as Andrej is as a ML practitioner, he is an absolute world class mastermind at teaching this stuff.

imakwana 4y ago

MIT course series on Computation Structures: https://computationstructures.org/ https://computationstructures.org/

novafacing 4y ago

pwn.college from the folks at ASU SEFCOM is by a significant margin the best comprehensive binary exploitation training you can get. There are video lessons from some of the top professors and graduate (and undergraduate) TAs, CTF players, and more alongside a massive suite of hands on practice and a community for discussion and learning. Video training sessions: https://youtube.com/@pwncollege https://youtube.com/@pwncollege Challenges: pwn.college Discord: https://pwn.college/discord https://pwn.college/discord

muzani 4y ago

Android/Kotlin course on Udacity, by Google: https://www.udacity.com/course/developing-android-apps-with-kotlin--ud9012 https://www.udacity.com/course/developing-android-apps-with-... This one is slightly out of date, but it's great, something I'd happily pay $300 or so for. The value is heavily subsidized by Google. I have taught week-long Android professional certifications and this does a lot better than most of them out there.

crossroadsguy 4y ago
Wish there was an excellent and advanced Android/Kotlin course.
- muzani 4y ago
  How advanced would you like it? This covers a good amount of material past beginner, like coroutines and viewmodels, but I can recommend some (paid) books if there's a particular topic.
  - crossroadsguy 4y ago
    Let’s say advanced Kotlin and Coroutines etc. More importantly I would love some course that challenges a senior developer in not only impl. coding but also in architecture and design beyond the famous fad architecture in Android world as of now
    - muzani 4y ago
      Sorry, just noticed this. Arguably, there's only really one proper architecture today: UI (View+ViewModels), Data, and possibly Domain in between. Most of the others seem to have more cons than pros. This is a great guide on architectures, more up to date than most articles on the topic: https://developer.android.com/topic/architecture https://developer.android.com/topic/architecture The previous linked tutorial covers coroutines well enough to do things with it. If you want to go further, I'd recommend figuring out how to combine Kotlin Flow with Compose; neither Compose nor Flow really shine without the other. Sadly can't find tutorials on this either. Planning to open source some templates some time this year.

tester756 4y ago

Maybe not my expertise, but it's rare to see this kind of content so if you want to learn something like: PCI/CXL/USB/x86/ARM/DRAM/SAS/AHCI/NVM/SATA/Virtualization/UEFI/Thunderbolt then I've seen this https://www.mindshare.com/ https://www.mindshare.com/ being recommended

quickthrower2 4y ago

ReactJS: https://scrimba.com/learn/learnreact https://scrimba.com/learn/learnreact Also just started the free FastAI course, seems very good so far

orhanerday 4y ago

CS50 is nice.

rg111 4y ago

* Machine Learning, Andrew Ng, Coursera * Practical Deep Learning for Coders, fast.ai * Mathematics for Machine Learning Specialization, Imperial College London * Deep Learning Specialization, Andrew Ng, Coursera

alin23 4y ago

On building iOS, iPadOS and macOS apps using the latest version of SwiftUI: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCIl409gNBsqKTe https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCI... Helped me a lot in building the apps I have published on https://lowtechguys.com/ https://lowtechguys.com/

LeegleechN 4y ago

Justinguitar.com for guitar.

BlameKaneda 4y ago

This Tour of Heroes tutorial can teach you just about everything that you need to know about Angular, and it can be completed in a pretty short amount of time. https://angular.io/tutorial/tour-of-heroes https://angular.io/tutorial/tour-of-heroes

andrei_says_ 4y ago

Kevin Powell on CSS - YouTube Jen Simmons on CSS grid - YouTube

fuy 4y ago

CMU's Andy Pavlo database courses and related webinars https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOiDTTqpfnWFf https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOi... https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOiDTTqpfnWFf https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjaKScG3l0nuOi...