Opinion CS50w: No Disrespect | Hacker News Reader

Opinion CS50w: No Disrespect

2 pointsarthtyagi2 comments

CS50 is actually a really noobish course and the problem doesn't lie in CS50 itself, it's a good good course and I don't mean any disrespect but CS50w and CS50g ( especially CS50w ) are giving noobies a false sense of accomplishment. I was having a look at some of the projects of CS50w that "teaches" Django and I found out that almost all of the code is pre-written and students are expected to just fill a few snippets within the project and that's it. The only time they are expected to build a project is during the Final Project session and by the looks of it, only a handful actually end up building something to the level of what a self-learner might build in a month with more experience in domains like debugging, reading documentations efficiently and so forth. In all what I mean to say is that even though CS50 is a good course for beginners, the way it teaches Django is kinda ridiculous.

Eh, it's good enough, in fact MIT has an even easier workshop where you pump out an express.js MVP and gives you just enough domain knowledge to make it happen: https://functionalcs.github.io/web/

CS50w is probably exactly what a self learner would want, a crash course on how to make something work and advice where to find more information. It's like those ancient text files I used to find about writing your own LKM, they didn't teach me everything there is to know about operating systems but taught me just enough so I could go forth and learn independently, that's the point of all these short workshop style courses on edx.

Well I'm a self learner too and I can testify that if you're actually looking to get some serious work done, taking this course isn't really gonna help. I started out with the Django documentation itself, reverse engineering a few projects that I thought were nice and just trying to understand the code in those projects. CS50w gives you an illusion that you're building and understanding something when in actuality you just filled a few holes, made a final project that JUST works ( apart from a few notable exceptions who probably tried learning Django themselves too while taking CS50w ) instead of struggling through the process of getting things to work. That struggle is exactly what lays down a strong foundation and experience in one's programming journey.

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