What is you want to study computer science, but can’t afford university fees? Or, studied computer science a really long time ago and want to see what’s changed? Or just like learning stuff? Well, lots of schools now post their lectures on YouTube, so its entirely possible to construct a zero cost “self driving degree”, as long as you’re good enough at Canva to make your own certificate at the end. I consider this list incomplete, but in the end I decided I’d post the things from 2025 that I’d found and liked. I can always do an updated version later.
Introduction
- First let’s nail down some basics with Crash Course Computer Science. This covers some fundamental stuff like binary maths, logic gates, as well as providing a good overview of the history of computing in general.
Databases
The focus here isn’t on SQL itself, there are lots of places to learn that. Instead, the focus here is how does a database actually work under the hood? That said, let’s chuck in a quick SQL introduction anyway.
- freeCodeCamp.org’s SQL for web developers course I will admit I didn’t actually watch this one but I have recommended it to others who wanted to brush up on SQL. I made that recommendation on the basis of quite liking Lane Wagner’s golang course (included below).
- CMU Introduction to Database Systems with Andy Pavlo (US fall semester 2024): Andy is an excellent teacher, quite funny at times, and good at explaining the underlying concepts in a way I found really engaging. Honestly, everything I’ve seen from Andy has been good content.
- CMU Advanced Database Systems (US spring semester 2024): this one is aspirational for me. I intended to watch it in 2025, but simply ran out of time because of other learning tangents. 2026 for sure!
Operating Systems
- Maybe Berkeley CS162, but it spends way too much time (8 lectures!) on mutual exclusion and locks. I haven’t actually finished this one yet.
- Real world implementation:
- Johannes 4GNU_linux’s linux device driver tutorial: these videos are really good in terms of content, but the quality of delivery is noticably better in the newer videos than the older ones. Luckily the creator appears to be re-recording many of them at the moment so that will improve over time. That said, be careful with the playlist because as it is re-created there are duplicate videos. If a topic appears to be covered twice, pick the newer video!
- This Red Hat Summit 2018 talk on SELinux is probably the best introduction to Mandatory Access Control (MAC) that I’ve seen.
- This talk by Kavya Joshi is a good introduction to locks in general, but covers Linux futexes in detail. Locking is interesting, and important.
Networking
I am a bit shocked to discover that you can get through an entire Computer Science degree now without covering networking at all. That’s… concerning.
- Jeremy’s IT Lab CCNA course despite not having the most exciting delivery ever, this course is well delivered. Whilst a CCNA might be perceived as vendor specific, the Associate level actually isn’t really. Sure, all the demos and labs use Cisco software, but the concepts are equally applicable to all implementations. That’s not quite as true for the more senior levels of Cisco certification however.
Programming Languages
- freeCodeCamp.org’s introduction to Golang programming course is good, but does assume previous experience as a programmer. I think that’s why I liked it, because it didn’t spend ages explaining what a variable was or whatever.
Machine Learning
- freeCodeCamp.org’s Hot dog or not hot dog is a quick and pretty high level introduction to neural networks, tensorflow, and training an object detection model.
Security
- Android App Reverse Engineering is a live stream that Maddie Stone did during the COVID lock downs. Honestly, it feels to me like the audience and tooling didn’t treat her well during the stream, and as a result the video could do with an edit, but this is literally what went out live. This is the best content I’ve been able to find so far on how to actually reverse engineer an Android app while looking for malware. I have watched other courses, but they then to be very high level and vague, whereas this course has you actually reverse engineer actual applications. I just wish the live stream had been a better experience for Maddie. As a general thing, all of the talks I’ve seen from Maddie have been good.