CS fundamentals resources for developers

Tutorial-style videos on electronics and computer architecture, best known for building an 8-bit computer and a 6502-based computer on breadboards, one wire at a time. There are also series on digital electronics, networking and error detection. It suits anyone who wants to understand how a computer actually works from logic gates up.

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The official site of the ICPC, the university programming contest where teams of three share one computer for five hours and advance from regional contests towards the World Finals. It is where coaches register teams, where the current regional and World Finals rules are published, and where you find contests, results and past problems.

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A full-cost scholarship for citizens of any country outside the UK to take a full-time master's or a PhD at the University of Cambridge. It covers tuition, a maintenance allowance, airfare and visa costs, with around 70 awards a year. You apply through Cambridge's graduate application, and selection rests on academic excellence, course fit, commitment to others and leadership.

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The de facto calendar and ranking system for the global Capture the Flag scene, listing upcoming and past competitions, rating teams on performance since 2011, and archiving write-ups from finished events. Useful once you have done a beginner CTF like picoCTF and want to find the next one to join.

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A free online book that walks you through building two complete interpreters for a small scripting language, one in Java and one in C, explaining scanning, parsing, evaluation, bytecode, virtual machines and garbage collection along the way. It is the friendliest route to understanding how programming languages work.

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A widely used operating systems textbook from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, free to read chapter by chapter online. It is organised around three ideas, virtualisation, concurrency and persistence, and written in a friendly, question-driven style with homework simulators and projects. It is the best free way to understand processes, scheduling, virtual memory, locks and file systems.

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A French Government scholarship, managed by Campus France, for international students on master's and PhD programmes in France, including mathematics, digital technology and engineering. It pays a monthly allowance plus travel, health insurance and housing help. You cannot apply yourself: your French university or school nominates you.

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The Turkish Government's scholarship for bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees at Turkish universities, open to citizens of all countries. It covers tuition, a monthly stipend, accommodation, health insurance, flights and a year of Turkish language study, and it places you at a university from up to 12 preferences. Selection includes a committee review and an interview.

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The Hungarian Government's scholarship for bachelor's, master's and PhD study at Hungarian universities, with many programmes in English. It covers tuition, a monthly stipend, a dormitory place or housing contribution and medical insurance, though the stipend is a contribution to living costs rather than the full amount. Pakistanis are nominated through HEC and Indians through UGC.

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The quick-revision companion to the Programming foundations roadmap: language basics, collections, errors and files, a chapter of essentials for Python, JavaScript, Java, C++ or C#, the command line and Git, how computers run code, data structures and Big-O, clean design, testing and shipping projects. Use it to check what you half remember before a project, an exam or a technical conversation.

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Japan's government scholarship for international students, funded by the education ministry (MEXT). The Research Student category pays tuition, a monthly allowance and a return air ticket for a master's or PhD at a Japanese university, with Japanese language preparation if you need it. Applicants from Pakistan and India can apply through the Japanese embassy in their country.

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A 2020 Cambridge University Press textbook by Marc Peter Deisenroth, A. Aldo Faisal and Cheng Soon Ong, free as a PDF. It covers linear algebra, analytic geometry, matrix decompositions, vector calculus, probability and optimisation, then applies them to linear regression, PCA, Gaussian mixture models and support vector machines. It is for students who want to know exactly why ML methods work, and are ready for more rigour than a video course.

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A free video series from 3Blue1Brown that explains vectors, matrices, determinants, change of basis and eigenvectors as geometric transformations you can watch happen. It is for students and developers heading into machine learning, graphics or data work who can do matrix arithmetic but do not really see what it means. A few evenings with it make later maths courses and ML papers far easier to follow.

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A free series of 40 short videos hosted by Carrie Anne Philbin and produced with PBS Digital Studios, running from electricity, logic gates and binary through CPUs, memory, programming languages, operating systems, networks, the internet, security and AI. It gives beginners the whole picture of how a computer works in a few evenings, which makes later programming and CS courses far easier to follow.

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A very large, actively maintained GitHub index of free programming books, courses, interactive tutorials, podcasts, cheat sheets and problem sets, organised by programming language and subject and available in more than 40 human languages. It is run by the Free Ebook Foundation. Check it before buying a book: many standard texts are legally free from their authors or publishers.

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A curated GitHub list of step-by-step tutorials for rebuilding well known technologies from scratch: databases, Git, shells, compilers, Docker, operating systems, web servers, emulators, search engines and more, in many languages. It is maintained by CodeCrafters and is one of the most starred repositories on GitHub. It suits developers who have finished beginner courses and want a project that teaches how real systems work underneath.

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A short, opinionated guide by Oz Nova and Myles Byrne naming the nine computer science subjects that matter most for software engineers, with one recommended book and one video course for each. It is for self-taught engineers and bootcamp graduates who want to close the gap with a formal CS education, and its value is in what it leaves out.

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A complete undergraduate computer science curriculum assembled from free online courses, sequenced by prerequisites and maintained by a community on GitHub. It covers programming, maths, systems, theory, security, applications and ethics, then electives and a final project. It suits highly self-directed learners who want a degree's worth of material without the cost, and are ready to supply their own accountability.

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A long running YouTube channel where university researchers and practitioners explain computer science topics in short videos, from hashing, compression and cryptography to floating point, AI and security. It is produced with the University of Nottingham and suits self-taught developers and students who want to fill theory gaps casually, without committing to a course.

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Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke is a book that teaches programming through JavaScript, now in its fourth edition (2024). It covers the language, the browser and Node.js, with four project chapters and exercises you can run in the page. It is free to read online, with a paper edition from No Starch Press. It suits people who can already write some code and want to think and write like a programmer, not just learn syntax.

• Web
• Programming
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A beginner-friendly, text-based course on the building blocks every system design is assembled from: scalability and availability, back-of-the-envelope estimation, networking and DNS, proxies, load balancers, API gateways, rate limiting, caching, CDNs, partitioning, replication, CAP and PACELC, SQL and NoSQL databases, indexes and distributed patterns such as quorum and heartbeats. Start here if full design walkthroughs feel like they assume knowledge you do not have.

• System design
• Backend
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A text based course on the classic object oriented design patterns, 22 in all across creational, structural and behavioural groups, with a real world problem, class diagram, pros and cons and code in Python, Java, JavaScript and C++ for each. It suits developers who meet patterns in code reviews and want to apply them where they help rather than everywhere, and those preparing for low level design discussions.

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• Backend

A short, text based course on the five SOLID principles behind maintainable object oriented code, showing broken code first and then the fix, with examples in Java, Python, C++, C# and JavaScript. It also covers when not to apply each principle. It suits developers in their first few years whose classes are hard to test or change, and anyone who can expand the acronym but cannot explain what each principle forbids.

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A foundations course that builds eleven core data structures from the ground up (arrays, matrices, stacks, queues, linked lists, trees and BSTs, hash tables, hash sets, heaps, graphs and tries), then covers sorting, searching, greedy and divide and conquer. Every chapter has practice problems, flashcards and an assessment. It suits students and career switchers whose foundations came from tutorials and who find pattern courses move too fast.

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