A Harvard course on systems programming and machine organization, covering how computers run programs at a low level. Commenters describe weekly problem sets with heavy pointer work, plus labs that go deeper than the lectures.

Commenters call it one of the outstanding CS courses in the Harvard sequence, though terse in style, and recommend it as a next step after CS50.

What commenters said (2)

1. Recommendsarcturus172020in “Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire”

   1. There’s a companion C book for the course 2. The labs go into much more detail compared to lectures 3. The psets can be Nintendo-hard; you’ll be doing devilish pointer stuff by week 3 or 4.

   The happy-go-lucky, flashy tone of the course is completely misleading. It is a challenging course, so much so that it’s been the subject of numerous cheating scandals from students caving under the pressure over the years.

   As for depth, this is a first intro to CS meant not only for CS majors but for people from other domains (Econ, humanities, hard sciences, what have you). The style is meant to cater to people who might not be a priori fascinated by flipping bits. Still quite a bit of people decide to concentrate on CS after taking the class, so it must be doing something right in that sense...

   The course is not mandatory for CS concentrators, so if you already know your fundamentals you can jump right into CS51 (functional programming) or CS61 (intro to systems), which are outstanding courses but much more terse in style.

2. Recommendsmontenegrohugo2020in “Ask HN: What are good distance learning Bachelor's/Master's degrees one can do?”

   Can't edit my comment on mobile, so I'm adding relevant info here:

   https://www.extension.harvard.edu/

   It's not exactly cheap (tuition can cost ~50k$ for a bachelor's). Quality of tuition also varies, there's some fantastic courses and some less stellar ones. Still, I recommend taking a look if you are interested in completing your bachelor's/master's degree mostly online.

   For a CS oriented degree, I'd definitely recommend the following courses:

   CS50 https://cs50.harvard.edu

   CS61 https://cs61.seas.harvard.edu

   CS20 https://lewis.seas.harvard.edu/pages/csci-e-20

   CS40 https://www.extension.harvard.edu/course-catalog/courses/com...

   CS121 https://cs121.boazbarak.org/

   CS124 http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~libcs124/cs124/index.html

Related courses

• CS50: Introduction to Computer ScienceHarvard University · 72 recommenders
• CS51 Functional ProgrammingHarvard University · 1 recommender
• CS121: Introduction to Theory of ComputationHarvard University · 1 recommender
• The Elements of Computing Systems (Nand2Tetris)nand2tetris.org · 87 recommenders
• Human Behavioral Biology (Robert Sapolsky)Stanford University · 26 recommenders
• 6.824 Distributed SystemsMIT OpenCourseWare · 16 recommenders
• 15-213 Introduction to Computer SystemsCarnegie Mellon University · 12 recommenders
• 6.004 Computation StructuresMIT OpenCourseWare · 9 recommenders