ossu/computer-science

▲ 41 stars today★ 209,022⑂ 25,868

🎓 Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science!

209,022Star

25,868Fork

0Watch

0Issue

HTMLLanguage

-License

Open on GitHub ↗

Created · last push · repository size 0 KB · default branch -

README

Open Source Society University

Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science!

Summary
Community
Curriculum
Code of conduct
Team

Summary

The OSSU curriculum is a complete education in computer science using online materials. It's not merely for career training or professional development. It's for those who want a proper, well-rounded grounding in concepts fundamental to all computing disciplines, and for those who have the discipline, will, and (most importantly!) good habits to obtain this education largely on their own, but with support from a worldwide community of fellow learners.

It is designed according to the degree requirements of undergraduate computer science majors, minus general education (non-CS) requirements, as it is assumed most of the people following this curriculum are already educated outside the field of CS. The courses themselves are among the very best in the world, often coming from Harvard, Princeton, MIT, etc., but specifically chosen to meet the following criteria.

Courses must:

Be open for enrollment
Run regularly (ideally in self-paced format, otherwise running multiple times per year)
Be of generally high quality in teaching materials and pedagogical principles
Match the curricular standards of the CS 2013: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Computer Science

When no course meets the above criteria, the coursework is supplemented with a book. When there are courses or books that don't fit into the curriculum but are otherwise of high quality, they belong in extras/courses or extras/readings.

Organization. The curriculum is designed as follows:

Intro CS: for students to try out CS and see if it's right for them
Core CS: corresponds roughly to the first three years of a computer science curriculum, taking classes that all majors would be required to take
Advanced CS: corresponds roughly to the final year of a computer science curriculum, taking electives according to the student's interests
Final Project: a project for students to validate, consolidate, and display their knowledge, to be evaluated by their peers worldwide

Duration. It is possible to finish within about 2 years if you plan carefully and devote roughly 20 hours/week to your studies. Learners can use this spreadsheet to estimate their end date. Make a copy and input your start date and expected hours per week in the Timeline sheet. As you work through courses you can enter your actual course completion dates in the Curriculum Data sheet and get updated completion estimates.

Warning: While the spreadsheet is a useful tool to estimate the time you need to complete this curriculum, it may not always be up-to-date with the curriculum. Use the OSSU CS website or the repo to see what courses to do.

Cost. All or nearly all course material is available for free. However, some courses may charge money for assignments/tests/projects to be graded. Note that both Coursera and edX offer financial aid.

Decide how much or how little to spend based on your own time and budget; just remember that you can't purchase success!

Process. Students can work through the curriculum alone or in groups, in order or out of order.

We recommend doing all courses in Core CS, only skipping a course when you are certain that you've already learned the material previously.
For simplicity, we recommend working through courses (especially Core CS) in order from top to bottom. Some students choose to study multiple courses at a time in order to vary the material they are working on in a day/week. A popular option is to take the math courses in parallel with the introductory courses. Course prerequisites are listed to help you determine if you are prepared for a given course.
Courses in Advanced CS are electives. Choose one subject (e.g. Advanced programming) you want to become an expert in and take all the courses under that heading. You can also create your own custom subject; the Discord community may provide feedback on your planned subject.

Content policy. If you plan on showing off some of your coursework publicly, you must share only files that you are allowed to. Respect the code of conduct that you signed in the beginning of each course!

How to contribute

Getting help (Details about our FAQ and chatroom)

Community

We have a Discord server! This should be your first stop to talk with other OSSU students. Why don't you introduce yourself right now? Join the OSSU Discord
You can also interact through GitHub issues. If there is a problem with a course, or a change needs to be made to the curriculum, this is the place to start the conversation. Read more here.
Add Open Source Society University to your Linkedin profile!

Warning: There are a few third-party/deprecated/outdated material that you might find when searching for OSSU. We recommend you to ignore them, and only use the OSSU CS website or OSSU CS Github Repo. Some known outdated materials are:

- An unmaintained and deprecated firebase app. Read more in the FAQ.

- An unmaintained and deprecated trello board

- Third-party notion templates

Curriculum

Prerequisites
Intro CS
Core CS
Core programming
Core math
CS Tools
Core systems
Core theory
Core security
Core applications
Core ethics
Advanced CS
Advanced programming
Advanced systems
Advanced theory
Advanced information security
Advanced math
Final project

---

Prerequisites

Core CS assumes the student has already taken high school math, including algebra, geometry, and pre-calculus.
Advanced CS assumes the student has already taken the entirety of Core CS

and is knowledgeable enough now to decide which electives to take.

Note that Advanced systems assumes the student has taken a basic physics course (e.g. AP Physics in high school).

Intro CS

This course will introduce you to the world of computer science and programming. This course gives you a flavor of the material to come. If you finish the course wanting more, Computer Science is likely for you!

Topics covered: computation imperative programming basic data structures and algorithms and more

Core CS

All coursework under Core CS is required, unless otherwise indicated.

Core programming

Topics covered: functional programming design for testing program requirements common design patterns unit testing object-oriented design static typing dynamic typing ML-family languages (via Standard ML) Lisp-family languages (via Racket) Ruby and more

Core math

Discrete math (Math for CS) is a prerequisite and closely related to the study of algorithms and data structures. Calculus both prepares students for discrete math and helps students develop mathematical maturity.

Topics covered: discrete mathematics mathematical proofs basic statistics O-notation discrete probability and more

CS Tools

Understanding theory is important, but you will also be expected to create programs. There are a number of tools that are widely used to make that process easier. Learn them now to ease your future work writing programs.

Topics covered: terminals and shell scripting vim command line environments version control and more

Core systems

Topics covered: procedural programming manual memory management boolean algebra gate logic memory computer architecture assembly machine language virtual machines high-level languages compilers operating systems network protocols and more

Core theory

Topics covered: divide and conquer sorting and searching randomized algorithms graph search shortest paths data structures greedy algorithms minimum spanning trees dynamic programming NP-completeness and more

Core security

Topics covered Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability Secure Design Defensive Programming Threats and Attacks Network Security Cryptography and more

Choose one of the following:

Core applications

Topics covered: Agile methodology REST software specifications refactoring relational databases transaction processing data modeling neural networks supervised learning unsupervised learning OpenGL ray tracing and more

Core ethics

Topics covered: Social Context Analytical Tools Professional Ethics Intellectual Property Privacy and Civil Liberties and more

Advanced CS

After completing every required course in Core CS, students should choose a subset of courses from Advanced CS based on interest. Not every course from a subcategory needs to be taken. But students should take every course that is relevant to the field they intend to go into.

Advanced programming

Topics covered: debugging theory and practice goal-oriented programming parallel computing object-oriented analysis and design UML large-scale software architecture and design and more

(*) book by Blackburn, Bos, Striegnitz (compiled from source, redistributed under CC license)

Advanced systems

Topics covered: digital signaling combinational logic CMOS technologies sequential logic finite state machines processor instruction sets caches pipelining virtualization parallel processing virtual memory synchronization primitives system call interface and more

Advanced theory

Topics covered: formal languages Turing machines computability event-driven concurrency automata distributed shared memory consensus algorithms state machine replication computational geometry theory propositional logic relational logic Herbrand logic game trees and more

Advanced Information Security

Advanced math

Courses | Duration | Effort | Prerequisites | Discussion :-- | :--: | :--: | :--: | :--: [Ess