My First Day Learning CS50x

Here's the Homepage of edX

I felt so lucky yesterday. A facebook friend posted a link of top universities giving free online courses. I visited the link and got interested in one particular piece of information on the page. I saw Harvard giving an online course (CS50) and what's more interesting is that the course/program is starting the very same day.

So I immediately signed up and a few hours later, I was already exchanging messages with participants. There's a lot of participants from all over the world. I talked with a guy from Italy, US, Egypt, India and even some from here (Philippines). After a few chit-chats I started viewing the videos on the courseware page. It took me some time to view the videos and it frequently stopped though I was already using a 2 Mbps connection. However, one guy from Egypt said he was able to download the first video in 10 minutes.

So back to the course, the instructor is Prof. David J. Malan and he was really cool in the introductory video. It's a recording of the actual Harvard CS50 Class. They recorded the actual class and it's what we will study/watch in the coming weeks. Though I was only watching the video, it pretty much felt like I was a part of the class, the introduction was excellent and the initial topic that included binary math was refreshing.

I already learned it before 15 years ago when I took up an associate degree in Computer Science here in Manila but I've already forgotten it. It had no actual use in my work as Accounting Systems Developer where I dealt with a database programming language (Clipper and Visual Foxpro).

The introduction was very lively, with a musical skit presented by Harvard seniors. I kinda felt my passion for programming rekindled. I guess it's the spirit of Harvard being shared with me through online learning.

I also liked the open mindset that Prof. David is instilling in students. He discussed the topics that we will be covering that includes cryptography, forensic, C, PHP and SQL. He mentioned that in the weeks to come we will learn about password decryption, deleted files recovery, and web programming. He presented it in a way that it felt like doing all these is actually a challenge. There are even two sets of problems for students, one is the standard level and the other is the hackers level for those who want to satisfy their cravings to do some deep level programming. It's excellent. With this kind of open acceptance to learning and imparting knowledge I can easily see why Harvard produces some of the best people in every industry.

In a few minutes I'll be working on my first course activity, game programming using scratch. Wish me luck.