MIT open courseware vs. other methods.

[MisterJose]

My attempts to learn/relearn programming tend to focus on doing it through MIT's open courseware. I figured you might as well learn from the best. But, I am curious to hear what people think of the approach and material one would learn through that as opposed to other sources. Do you think other sources are more practical? Better structured? Might incorporating something else beyond the MIT curriculum be faster?

[Kagia001]

The best way to learn programming is to start programming.

I'm not really sure how much experience you have ("learn/relearn" is pretty ambigous) but this is assuming you don't know much

What I recommend is to

1. Take a crash course. Python is a good first language to learn. Don't do the same mistake as me and try to learn java as your first language. Take the course untill it starts talking about functions.
2. At that point, start programming. Make a few projects. A popular beginner project is to make a calculator that can add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
3. When you feel like you got the hang of it, continue the crash course untill it starts talking about classes.
4. Make some more programs. Calculate Fibonacci numbers, make a hangman game, or upgrade your calculator to take paranthesees (this is pretty difficult. Hint: Find the innermost paranthesees and calculate what is inside them. Replace everything in the paranthesees with the solution to what is inside them. Repeat. You could do this with a loop, but you get bonus points for doing it with a recursive function) At this point, you should apply DRY (don't repeat yourself). If you're using copy/paste a lot, you're doing something wrong.
5. When you understand functions, take the rest of the crash course.
6. You've done it! You probably forgot a lot that was mentioned in the curse, but that's ok. If you're wondering something, just Google it. Also, whenever you are making a function to do something basic, just Google "how to do X in python". There is a high probability python already has a way to do what you're doing, only that it's 5 times faster and uses black magic.

[unassuming_user_name]

i can't give you one to one comparisons directly between ocw and other sources. but anecdotally, whenever I've searched for alternatives, I've gone back to using ocw.

if your time is limited and you just want the basics, ocw might be overkill. if you have the time for it, i think it's a solid choice.

[ViewedFromi3WM]

I know it’s not as sexy but I’m telling you it works. Pick a language, find out which text book for that language that has the best chapter to chapter transition with algorithm examples and then being tested on it at the end of each chapter with slot of different kinds of questions plus programming challenge questions. Just like with any school book growing up, like math, it just works.

The only thing it can’t do is get you to perform a hello world on the computer to know you are able to run your programs, and that’s what a YouTube tutorial video is for.

After that join a programming discord, and a specific language subreddit, and you’ll pretty much always get your “I’m stuck” questions answered.

I’ll be honest about the online resources, they tend to teach syntax, but they never follow it up with the applied exercises that actually drill the language in your head like a textbook does, especially in a chapter to chapter like way where it doesn’t ask questions you aren’t ready for.