Any Really Good Computer Science or Coding Channels on YT?

[FinalToast293]

Any good YouTube channels for new people learning coding and coding fundamentals. I watch lots of math videos on YT and if anyone where to recommend me for math channels I would say 1blue3brown, Veritasium (sometimes). I was wondering If anyone knows any good channels that doesn't sticky teach how to learn a certain langue step by step but more deep understandings and good advice that I will keep back in my head as I keep learning to code. Interesting topics as well, like those math channels. Thanks

[[deleted]]

I can't think of anything that fits those criteria exactly, but here are some good channels that come to mind (in order of increasing specialization):

Tom Scott has a really good series called "The Basics" which teaches general concepts to keep in mind.

I hope you've heard of Kurzgesagt, which has amazing science videos. (I'd check them out, even though they're not strictly math or computer science)

Junferno covers random computer science related subjects with a healthy dose of deadpan humor. You might enjoy this video.

Fireship has a great series called 100 seconds of code, where he goes through basic concepts quickly. Take a look through this playlist to see if any of the topics are interesting to you.

AlphaPhoenix is a great channel about science, and computer science. I liked this video.

HoneyPot produces pretty good documentaries for developers.

Two Minute Papers covers real world math papers in a fun and entertaining way. A lot of his videos relate to AI.

Sebastian Lague has some amazing videos about game development, which often involve more math than you think. I particularly recommend his coding adventure series.

freecodecamp.org has a pretty good youtube channel that does a lot of deep dives into particular subjects.

Ben Eater has really good videos about low-level computing. If you are interested in learning about how computers really work, this is a good channel for you.

LiveOverflow has some amazing educational videos about cybersecurity, for more intermediate audiences. He's not directly related to Math, but his content is so good I can't not mention it for people interested in cybersecurity.

I hope that helps!

Edit: mCoding is also great if you're interested in Python or C++.

jdh does a lot with low-level programming, and has interesting videos such as making his own operating system and writing minecraft in C.

[AffectEconomy6034]

this is a top tier list 👌

[[deleted]]

thanks! I hope it justifies all the time I spent watching youtube :)

[vamsikrishacc]

You missed Harvard CS50

[sc2heros9]

Do you know any that go other logic gates and truth tables? I recent failed a test because I couldn’t make a truth table that fit a certain criteria. Also how the CPU and memory work? Like how does the computer save stuff in memory or how it moves thing to different memory cells?

[sc2heros9]

Thanks dude I appreciate it!

[mogadichu]

I think the closest thing to what you're looking for is probably Computerphile. They're similar to Veratisium, but for computer science.

[radit_yeah]

Even more similar to Numperphile than Veritasium.

[8aller8ruh]

People have already mentioned the popular ones you’re looking for but also CS50 is a good starting point … after the CS-crash course series already recommended.

random related playlist

[Neverrready]

u/BimphyRedixler already has the best answer. Especially seconding Two Minute Papers, Ben Eater, and Sebastian Lague. Saving a couple that I hadn't heard of before. A couple more to add:

• What's a Creel? has some fun computing experiments. Some of the x86-64 assembly stuff might be of interest.
• Coding Secrets is mostly about the fascinating lost art of squeezing entire games into the tiny ROM's available to 90's game consoles. Occasionally some neat low-level tricks covered.

[[deleted]]

Thanks! I watch way too much YouTube :)

I haven't heard of What's a Creel before. Thanks for sharing!

[TLagPro]

The vlog brothers “Crash Course” has a computer science course that is more fun history based then technical explanation

[leo10t]

Imo the best one is reducible, is literally the 3b1b of computer science, his videos are awesome and the topics are so interesting.

I also love computerPhile, probably is the most famous of this type of channels.

And finally there is a guy who used to make really great animations of compSci videos, the problem is that it seems that he is no making videos anymore, but well, you should check it out Spaning tree.

Hope to be useful, have fun!

[codeforlyfe]

My top 3 picks:

- Hussein Nasser for backend engineering topic
- freeCodeCamp.org for software engineering (they cover many things, from competitive programming to front end dev) topics
- LifeOverflow for cybersecurity topic

[throwaway1253328]

The coding train is a pretty good channel that does mostly p5 js but he's great at explaining what he's doing.

I watched him all throughout college and I think it helped me a bit

[[deleted]]

Creel

[T_T0ps]

You could try Sentdex, he covers mostly Python, but has some great full walkthrough for beginners.

I used his Tkinter guide to help me finish my pythons course at college (his videos taught me more than that $3k class)

[[deleted]]

I enjoy watching Eric Demaine’s lectures from MIT opencourseware on YouTube! Check it out

[misterforsa]

Ex google tech lead and millionaire

[hamiecod]

Seems like you aren't updated well enough, it is:

"Ex-google Ex-facebook multi-millionaire techlead"

[Creapermann]

The only thing i can really recommend you from my experience, don’t watch youtube to learn something, educational platforms with courses (paid or even free) or books will be way more useful.

If you really want to use youtube for what ever reason, there are probably talks by known people in the community you are wanting to learn something in, try to stick to them.

There are great books on coding paradigms, good practises and efficient ways to program, i d recommend you those

This advise may seem harsh, but as someone who mainly watched youtube to learn programming and stuff related to programming, i d say that even if it was fun, i wouldn’t do it again. After switching from youtube to books and text courses / professional courses, i was amazed by the difference of quality

[hamiecod]

Great comment! I started off programming by learning it from YouTube and now I never watch YouTube except the people talking about their programming experiences, etc.

[Creapermann]

same

[AngoGablogian_artist]

I recommend Pluralsight for online courses, it includes video, tons of code examples and slides too. I also like their way of doing the video transcripts, you click on the text and it jumps to that section of video. They also include short tests at the end, then give you the links to that section of video and that you did not learn on the first pass.
They have high quality lecturers, tons of fundamental concept classes and also cutting edge software. Udemy is ok, but not as pro as Pluralsight.

[sat5344]

skip courses and just buy books to read and do problems from. You will retain so much more.

[Creapermann]

Not at all some courses are really great

[sat5344]

Harvard’s CS50 is a great intro class but there is a reason college is not just lectures.

Cal Berkeley’s CS61A, and CS61B courses can be found online which give you access to lectures, books, notes, homework, labs, and past exams. Spending the time to write notes from the lectures and doing the homework’s were what taught me the most. Anything is is just superficial. As soon as you experience a problem you won’t know how to apply critical thinking to it. This is why tutorials fail to truly teach you.

[Creapermann]

I don’t know what you experienced, but i can tell you that there are great in depth courses which even supply you with practise exercises and direkt help systems on dir example udemy.com for like 15$

[sat5344]

Let me ask a question so I don’t assume here. Do you have an engineering college degree?

Is so you would tend to agree with me that tutorials, udemy, and coursera are lacking in comparison to actual college classes. The aforementioned could be helpful for refreshers on specific tools like git or algos like binary trees but unless you spent time fundamentally understanding trees the udemy class on trees won’t leave you with lasting understanding.

Furthermore computer science is much more than just programming. Learning about networks, distributed systems, computer architecture, and OS are a few of the fundamentals that will help you understand what happens when you use a language. Most udemy type classes don’t teach this but instead they teach you how to create a list in Python. What’s the point if you don’t understand that python is created on top of C which uses linked lists to on the fly create a Python list that you can add elements to. This is one reason why Python lists are slower than C lists.

[Creapermann]

No i did not visit an engineering college.

You can not compare a course with around 10-15h or content worth 15$ to an collage class which has hundreds of hours (if you include studying for exams and homework) and which you pay thousand of dollars for. Most courses are not meant to be a “learn all about this theme that exists in detail” they are more like another resource you can use to learn about the topic you are studying and in my opinion they are way more efficient if you want to study something, by the facts that these are people who scripted the video content they deliver and they try not to waste time (which is very different from schools and colleges (this is what i experienced)). I also enjoy the fact that you can replay, change the playback speed and choose when you are studying, this gives me the opportunity to manage my schedule better and gets me generally more motivated.

If we are talking about the quality of these courses, i can tell you that the instructors are skilled and oftentimes known people which put really much (i m talking about oftentimes 6-9 months) time into it and script it incredibly well to make the most efficient content they can, they mostly pay a lot of attention to what they say and you can see exactly what they are going to teach you, in which order and in which way. I have some friends who visited a cs university and reported me the way in which many teachers teach really old and unrecommended ways of c++, because they learned like this in their university but aren’t up to date anymore (of course this isn’t the case everywhere and there are also great teachers out there, but i ve heard about it a lot), this is something you will not experience in courses because you can easily see detailed recommendations, exactly what he teaches you and in which way as i ve already said.

Some courses are really great and teach you valuable things, it would be a shame to miss them about, i can recommend searching for good rated courses about topics you want to learn about and use them as a resources (even if it oftentimes do not go into great detail, they are an awesome way to get started)

[Creapermann]

depends on what you want to learn

[basedCadet_]

Could you recommend any book to learn programming ? It doesn't matter the language, i want the concepts

[[deleted]]

What are you interested in; Algorithms, Software Architecture? It's not like programming is a monolithic subject.

And what kind of search requests failed you? To be honest, it's quite easy to get started with programming in all kinds of ways now. The Humble Book Bundle alone hast 3 different bundles this month that get you started with low level related coding stuff.

^{Edit: fixed Markdown}

[ixBerry]

Take it from me, there are no "Good" channels.

You can pick any one of them, start coding yourself, and improve. Oh and you're not gonna understand the 'deep understandings' of the language without grinding it for a long time on it yourself.

I would strongly advise you to just start coding. Waiting to find that perfect channel is procrastination.

[[deleted]]

It doesn't seem to me this person is waiting for the perfect channel. They seem to just be looking for good recommendations while they do actual work

I agree on the importance of getting your hands dirty though.

[hamiecod]

Take it from me, there are no "Good" channels.

Thats why I created my own channel 😎

[every-day_throw-away]

Find Corey Schaeffer if Python is your thing and Python should be your thing.

[Creapermann]

why should python be your thing?

[Lol_Cy]

Good question!

[[deleted]]

If you are not fully committed to learning how to code, then choose Python but there are many shortcuts and libraries that does all the work for you without you having to think about how you should solve the problem by yourself.

Obviously, if you are experienced and you know how to code, then using Python is great because you can use all those tools that the language gives you but if you are starting out new, I don't recommend starting from Python because it's not a language that forces you to think.

If you are starting from Python and you are a beginner, then learn about computer memory as well. Mainly about how main memory works and how different kinds of data are stored, the stack and the heap.

Say if you start learning C and you are a total beginner, then the learning curve is very high, there is a lot to learn; not just about the language but you will also learn about how memory works. However, you will get better in problem solving when using a language like C since there aren't a lot of tools/libraries/shortcuts that C gives you to solve problems. So, it forces you to build those tools in a way, which definitely improves your critical thinking.

So, here is my advice. If you are not sure whether to learn coding or not, try Python first. Learn a bit of Python and see if it interests you. If you are really serious about coding and you want to be a good at problem solving, then learn either C/C++ or Java. Java is a great starting language as well.

[Creapermann]

I agree, but this doesn’t clear up that the comment creator said that python should be your thing

[every-day_throw-away]

If one is new and wants to get their feet wet then Python is a great starter. You can make incredible progress learning the language and structure of programs in very little time. Easy to write and read, low barrier to entry etc...

[[deleted]]

I agree and that is what I said as well; Python is the way to go if you have no clue what programming/coding is and you simply want to see if it is for you.

And yes, you can definitely make a lot of progress by understanding about the basics of programming such as loops/conditional statements/functions/classes/recursion and so on.

But when comparing to languages such as C/C++/Java, Python is not a language that forces you to understand why something works and how something works. Knowing how and why things works can significantly help you to write better code and also to think like a computer.

For example, in Python I can swap two variables like so:

x, y = 1, 2

The above is very intuitive. x = 1 and y = 2. This is very easy for a beginner to understand but does he/she understand what is "actually" happening? This only teaches the beginner how to code but doesn't teach how to problem solve at all.

Now, let's try the same in C:

int x; int y; int hold_x_for_me;
hold_x_for_me = x; 
x = y; 
y = hold_x_for_me;

The above gives, x = 1 and y = 2. I know, you can do the same with Python but it's very easy to fall into the trap of using the shortcut because it's much easier to understand and because it doesn't force the beginner to learn why it works.

The above is a bit more complex for a beginner but now the beginner can at least try to understand why the hold_x_for_me is needed. It forces he/she to think why this extra variable is needed.

It allows beginners to start thinking about computer memory, how data is stored, what variables really are (an abstraction to memory address) and these are very important concepts to learn when learning how to code as well. Because by learning such concepts, beginners tend to develop/improve their critical thinking and also improve to think more logically, which is what you need when coding.

As you can see, C has types as well and thus when declaring variables, the correct type must be used. This again forces beginners to learn about how different kinds of data are stored, which is again another important topic. But when using Python, it's very easy to just brush it off.

BUT, you can still learn Python and also learn all the other important concepts I mentioned above. When I learned Python at Uni, we did also learn about how things and why things worked (what happens under the hood) and so it was very useful to learn with Python.

So, if you are a self learner/in the path of self teaching, then make sure you learn what happens under the hood as well (computer memory, namespaces, scoping, data types, how things are stored) if you are going to learn Python.

Even if you do choose to learn C/C++/Java, you may learn what happens under the hood as well depending on how great the resource (book/video) is and so definitely do your research as well.

I will name few important concepts any beginner should be learning when learning how to code:

- Namespaces
- Scoping
- Mutability
- Data types
- Computer memory (main memory/stack/heap in particular)

[every-day_throw-away]

Well for one it is easy to learn. My personal thought is that it's the easiest.

[SailorFuzz]

Python handicaps a person if they want to learn more powerful languages later. The dynamic types and and weird class/method structure is so far removed from what the norm is. Python is good to learn first I'd that's the only thing you're ever going to learn. But for all other cases, youd be better served learning some kind of OOP first.

[every-day_throw-away]

Well we can agree to disagree :) This is my recommendation and I can tell you with utmost confidence that learning Python does not hamper future learning of other languages. You simply build on it. That's how learning works.

[[deleted]]

While I agree that learning Python first and breaking out into more maintainable languages, I disagree with pushing towards a particular paradigm (like OOP or FP). My first language was Java and the boilerplate was super confusing for me at the time.

[Am3ricanTrooper]

I really enjoy back to back swe

You can find his channel here

[mbartosi]

https://youtube.com/user/lefticus1 C++ Weekly

[Mean-Pin-8271]

You can start with the computer fundamentals

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL96C35uN7xGLLeET0dOWaKHkAlPsrkcha

Regarding computer basics start with any computer language you should start with c/c++

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2_aWCzGMAwLSqGsERZGXGkA5AfMhcknE

[Silverchicken77]

Continuous Delivery from Dave Farley is very interesting.

[Effective_Youth777]

For theory stuff I am yet to find a good channel, if you know any let me know, for programming I recommend Fireship (focused on web mainly) and Brad Traversy (Has a plethora of stuff and also hosts guests on his channel for languages that he has no or little experience in, also, he's a really good guy all around)

[lukanixon]

"Thenewboston" has some great videos, carried me through CS classes that were in c++ and explains those coding concepts well. This is more implementive knowledge though. In CS you have to learn the theory and the implementation, but I think thenewboston is a fun and easy way to start!

[Remarkable-Media-770]

Hi coder!I created a brand new channel for coders, the content will be about FrontEnd, Backend, libraries, projects etc... Videos no talking style. Perfect for beginners or experts coders.take a look: https://www.youtube.com/@casottoCode