At some point in 2013 I watched Lecture 1 of Harvard CS50 because everybody said that was the best starting point for people interested in web dev, product development, tech in general.
I just wanted to make a website to start off with, just a bunch of linked pages. I already knew a tiny bit of HTML from college, but that was years ago and I wanted to know what had changed. So you can imagine my confusion watching that CS50 lecture as it was seemingly covering everything EXCEPT the stuff non-technical end users are familiar with: websites, apps and games.
Yes, yes, I now know that CS isn't about coding but about underlying fundamentals. But that doesn't change the reality that CS50 online has been viewed many, many more times than people who've sat in a CS class, and those people likely had similarly simple goals as I did.
Long story short however, I took a video course on webdev and learned far more in terms of immediately applicable skills. Again, I wasn't trying to get hired at FAANG. I just wanted to get to the level of 'webmaster', where I knew just enough to handle markup, hosting, SSL and CRUD functions. Learning by doing has been far more rewarding than following online courses.
> I watched Lecture 1 of Harvard CS50 because everybody said that was the best starting point for people interested in web dev, product development, tech in general.
That was not good advice. CS50 is an excellent, introductory, survey CS course but it's still a CS course.
Most advice aimed at absolute beginners is bad, because the questions are bad. E.g. "what's the best programming language?"
You and I may know that the question is a bad one, but beginners don't know that. And when they ask, they aren't told to rephrase the question as "What would I like to build?" Someone will just say "well I know Javascript and...." and it goes from there.
I just wanted to make a website to start off with, just a bunch of linked pages. I already knew a tiny bit of HTML from college, but that was years ago and I wanted to know what had changed. So you can imagine my confusion watching that CS50 lecture as it was seemingly covering everything EXCEPT the stuff non-technical end users are familiar with: websites, apps and games.
Yes, yes, I now know that CS isn't about coding but about underlying fundamentals. But that doesn't change the reality that CS50 online has been viewed many, many more times than people who've sat in a CS class, and those people likely had similarly simple goals as I did.
Long story short however, I took a video course on webdev and learned far more in terms of immediately applicable skills. Again, I wasn't trying to get hired at FAANG. I just wanted to get to the level of 'webmaster', where I knew just enough to handle markup, hosting, SSL and CRUD functions. Learning by doing has been far more rewarding than following online courses.