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Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

> I am attracted by the resources/online/books posted by courses in UCB/Princeton/MIT/Stanford/CMU. At the same time I get boggled down and overwhelmed that I have soooooooooo many materials to cover.

I think you'd be better served by doing a lot of courses from the same institution. If you choose courses that were designed to fit together, you'll have a lot less wasted time from overlapping material or holes from missing material.

> Is it worth going through multiple university courses/books for the same topic?

What is your goal exactly? Is it to evaluate and compare everyone's materials?

If your goal is your own learning, then why wouldn't you take a more advanced course from the same institution instead of repeating a slightly different version of what you've already learned?

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> I think you'd be better served by doing a lot of courses from the same institution. If you choose courses that were designed to fit together, you'll have a lot less wasted time from overlapping material or holes from missing material.

I agree regarding choosing materials from a singular institution. Thing is, not all the institutions have all the courses and materials online. This in turn results in choosing specific courses from specific institutions which are available online. But the caveat here is that when I intermix the courses from different institutions, I find the prerequisites to be different since different institutions cover same/similar courses in different depths/breadths. For example, Databases in CMU are at a much higher standard than that of Stanford's.

> What is your goal exactly?

Goal is to learn since my undergrad is not in CS. I would not be able to afford a masters for the next 2-3 years so I am trying to use the intermediate time to get myself the undergrad curriculum knowledge I never had. I hope this would help me with enhancing my day to day job and also help me prepare when I apply for my masters/PhD.

>instead of repeating a slightly different version of what you've already learned

while I generally agree with your idea, a little counterpoint: it depends on a way you consume those materials. If you do that thoroughly, actually read and analyze source codes or examples, try things on your own as instructed, complete excercises and so on there is absolutely no point in doing multiple thins on the same topic. But if your preferred method is fast skimming, skipping some excercises and so on then skimming two or three books/videos/whatever on the same subject could make some sense. The latter method is very chaotic and is probably not the best idea to apply it for learning the fundamentals, but I just wanted to point out that such a learning technique does exist and sometimes makes sense, especially if just the general understanding is your goal.

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