At first I thought I’d follow along the MIT OCW 6.0001 course, but it’s like eight years old and on a far outdated version of Python and Anaconda. When I tried to install the software as per the syllabus’s instructions, I found the download links were dead. I had to spend a few hours going through archives to get the required Anaconda 4.1.1 and Python 3.5 only for it to not even work upon installing. When I tried opening the Anaconda navigator, the logo would pop up, it would say initializing, and then it would just crash before it could launch. Referring back to the syllabus was of no help because the instructions there were literally as brief as “Install Anaconda and Python 3.5 via the installer”.
I wasn’t able to troubleshoot any of this because all the google results for this question were full of jargon I sure as shit won’t be able to understand until I finish the course in the first place. I have no idea what an IDE is, what a pip is, what a spyder is, what a path variable is, or why one would want to use the command prompt.
I was actually able to successfully install the newest versions, but I can’t use these for the course because I’m an absolute beginner who has no frame of reference for what differences are actually going to be important.
Now I’m in the process of looking elsewhere. Problem is, I can’t find anything like the MIT OCW course. I really loved the videos of actual lectures and the fact that I didn’t have to enroll or sign in to anything. There exist a lot of Python tutorials on the internet, but I was hoping to also get an introduction to computer science in general because I need to learn the fundamentals of the subject. I’d like to have a deeper understanding than one would get by just learning a computer language without any of the theory behind it.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a more recent curriculum? Ideally I’d love it to have lecture videos, but I’ll be content with just problem sets and a good textbook if it’s up to date and has a robust step by step guide for setting up.
On the Python side, I can recommend Python Crash Course, it does not assume any kind of prior programming knowledge from the reader and will take you through all the base features of the language. If you want a more advanced dive into the language after you have covered the basics, Fluent Python is a personal favorite of mine.