Programming Languages, Part B

Coursera - Programming Languages by University of Washington

Would you consider the 3 part Programming Languages course on Coursera(linked below) a prerequisite or a building block for studies in Programming Language Theory?

https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages

https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages-part-b

https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages-part-c

Programming Languages, Part B

Oh, boy, Racket... :) I tried it for this course, it was crazy. I didn't know that people actually use that outside of teaching (thought that Scheme is for production applications).

I actually program in Javascript/Typescript, and after this course I can't write anything without anonymous (lambda) functions and lodash. :D

What do you want to do? Knowing what you want to do with the language would help to narrow the choices down. If you're just interested in learning a language for its own sake, you could try:

• Taking a course online that covers multiple languages, such as Programming Languages on Coursera: Part A (ML), Part B (Racket), Part C (Ruby).
• Scheme (a lisp). I've heard great things about SICP, but I haven't read it, regretfully.
• Python, as others have suggested, is very different from C and also very practical. It's a top language right now in industry, especially in data science and machine learning. I think it's still a major contender in server development as well.
• Java. Lots of people hate it for some reason. I love Java. It's got its quirks, sure, but I get the warm and fuzzies every time I use it, and it's one of the top languages in use today. Lots of practical stuff you can do with Java. Write servers. Program robots. Create a Minecraft plugin or write your own game.
• Rust. A very exciting up and coming languages. Has a lot of really nice features like compile time memory/thread safety guarantees, traits and an official package manager. It's a tough nut to crack at first (I'm still working on it myself), but it's really nice.
• JavaScript. Say what you will, but JavaScript is one of the top languages in use today. Learning JavaScript opens up frontend web development as an option for you. If you want to make a website that doesn't just sit there looking pretty, you'll have to go down this road eventually. Like Java, JavaScript has its quirks too, but is overall an enjoyable experience to use if you ignore some features (like double equals, unless you really know what you're doing). Paired with TypeScript, it's actually a joy.

If you're feeling analysis paralysis, I'd go with Java if you want something practical, or Scheme if you want your mind blown.

For introductory functional programming as taught in CS1101S, the following two MOOCs (which you can audit for free) would cover the same syllabus (with some additional concepts but lesser practice as compared to CS1101S):

1. Programming Languages, Part A
2. Programming Languages, Part B

The two courses are really well taught and emphasise greatly on designing good abstractions and communicating computational process through clear and concise code. As such, I think it conveys the ideas from CS1101S really well while complementing CS2030S by training you to be more thoughtful about the way you reason about and design your abstractions.

While the language taught in Part A is mainly used in formal verification and compiler related use cases, you can easily segue to something like OCaml which is a lot more general purpose. If you want to dive deeper into FP or topics tangent to FP, you might want to look at Haskell (it also further generalises the idea of a functor and monad that you picked up in CS2030).

With respect to CS2100, I think it's fine for you to take it right away; as far as the programming aspect is concerned, you'll be dealing with trivial C or assembly programs. CS2100 is mostly hard work and due diligence; pay attention to lectures and do all your tutorials and practices conscientiously. Be well prepared for the exams too (especially if it's still online) with tools and programs to optimise on the time spent, the paper is generally not completable (that's the sentiment for my batch if I'm not wrong).

Hope it helps and all the best for school!

Definitely possible. Going to highjack my own comment from another thread:

There is the Open Source Society University, which is a self-learning guide from beginner to very advanced: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science/blob/dev/README.md

Before you start trying to get a job out of programming, I believe you should really understand some basics from these courses:

• https://www.coursera.org/specializations/python
• https://www.coursera.org/specializations/computer-fundamentals
• https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-7
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages-part-b
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages-part-c
• https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x

After this you should be able to start learning most programming languages with some level of confidence that you kinda know what you are doing, and my advice is that you should start learning by doing before going through more advanced topics, using any of the other resources other people have shared with you.

My plan to learn programming, looking for criticism ...

At the start of 2018 I decided to learn programming, web development especially. But the more I learned, the more I found it to be enjoyable and that it is something that I really like, too bad I'm so late, I wish I had figured it out earlier. So I decided to learn more and not just dive into specialization in web development. I want to be a "good programmer" first, not just good with JavaScript. So I did some research and found a bunch of MOOCs and guides, I took them, mixed them up and made a plan to fit my goal. Here it is then:

March:

• https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x#!
• https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-mitx-6-00-1x-11

April:

• https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x
• https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-complex-data-ubcx-htc2x

May:

• https://www.edx.org/course/software-construction-data-abstraction-ubcx-softconst1x
• https://www.edx.org/course/software-construction-object-oriented-ubcx-softconst2x
• https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/about

June:

• https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages-part-b
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages-part-c

July:

• http://mooc.fi/courses/2013/programming-part-1/
• http://mooc.fi/courses/2013/programming-part-2/

August:

• https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/course-v1:Engineering+Algorithms1+SelfPaced/about
• https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/course-v1:Engineering+Algorithms2+SelfPaced/about

September:

• https://www.edx.org/course/software-engineering-introduction-ubcx-softeng1x
• https://www.edx.org/course/software-development-capstone-project-ubcx-softengprjx

Oct/Nov/Dec:

• https://www.udemy.com/the-web-developer-bootcamp/?siteID=EXclnL5BfX4-y_h6hFc_gg3Ot8FKUGLISg&LSNPUBID=EXclnL5BfX4
• https://www.udemy.com/the-advanced-web-developer-bootcamp/
• https://www.udemy.com/the-ultimate-mysql-bootcamp-go-from-sql-beginner-to-expert/

On top of all of this I'll maybe add some maths if needed. I have no idea if my time estimation is accurate, but I will only know by doing so we'll see ... I do this full time by the way. Feel free to criticize, any input is valuable, beside this month every other one ca be tweaked.

Thanks for reading.