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Resources to get better at theoretical CS?

23 points0culus8y ago15 comments

I was wondering if the HN community could suggest resources that might be helpful for getting over the hump on understanding theoretical CS.

To provide perspective, I'm a first year master's student in CS with a focus on cybersecurity. We are all required to take what is basically an advanced automata course. Undergrad automata was a while ago, and while I'm getting my feet again with DFAs and NFAs and regular expressions, I'm getting more and more lost as we move to more advanced material that either wasn't covered in undergrad or was only touched upon.

Thanks!

15 comments

14 comments · 5 top-level

jventura8y ago· 4 in thread

An alternative to the books and links posted here could be to find someone who can help you with your "basic" CS doubts? Kind of a hire-a-CS-tutor, who could provide you with the necessary information, teach you something and eventually pointing the way forward..

As a CS professor myself I've been entertaining this idea for a part-time thing, but I don't know how many people could be interested on a service like this.

As a 33 year-old, self-employed/self-taught web developer looking to become a more proficient programmer this interests me. I've been debating finishing up college to obtain my CS degree but it's only to fill the holes in my knowledge base rather than benefit from holding a degree. An arrangement much like a personal trainer at a gym could be an excellent model: identify areas to work on, come up with a plan, and check in.

Any suggestions on how an arrangement like that could work out for you, like weekly 1-hour online meetings for instance? Just trying to gather some generic opinions, aka "testing the market" :)

watashida8y ago

Something like an open office hours where I could drop in (maybe like a Twitch live stream situation) and ask computer science topics to professors and experts would be really great for me.

0culusOP8y ago

Yeah, that could be very good. Especially for people who are no longer students per se...sometimes having access to an expert is the best way to avoid going down the wrong autodidactic path :)

My professor is very helpful, but office hours and schedules can only mesh so much. I'm mainly looking for things I can supplement with to fill in any holes.

webmaven8y ago· 2 in thread

Check out the Open Source Society University's Computer Science learning path:

https://github.com/ossu/computer-science

Been looking for this for a while, but couldn't remember anything specific. So, thanks for the link :)

0culusOP8y ago

Thanks, this looks like a fantastic compendium. Will be looking through it.

sova8y ago· 2 in thread

Coursera has many excellent courses which I would recommend once you start diving into advanced applications. If your professors have a coffee-circle "Let's discuss a research paper once a week" get-together, I'd highly recommend attending. Even if you don't get a paper completely, it's really nice to give other people a brief on what it's about, and you end up learning a lot of really great stuff. It's a good way to get up to speed. Not really online resources as you're looking for, but thought I should mention it.

0culusOP8y ago

I'm not aware of anything like this currently, but I'll ask around. I know the professor for this class has run reading circles in prior semesters.

sova8y ago

It really is the best way. Half of my grad classes were exactly this format

gt565k8y ago· 1 in thread

Intro to theory of computation by Sipser is good.

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Micha...

0culusOP8y ago

That's the book we're using!

hackermailman8y ago

There's some undergrad DFA recorded lectures/notes here from CMU https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/#orgc8f0258 specifically this https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...

Regular Expressions I learned from these course notes on matching/staging (assume you know basic set theory notation) http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15150/previous-semesters/2012-spring/... and the accompanying chapters in Programming in Standard ML by Robert Harper http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/isml/book.pdf where you debug regexp

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