I’ll con­fess, when it comes to com­put­ers, I’m pret­ty much strict­ly a user. And these days, with the poten­tial free­dom and cre­ative­ly afford­ed by open access soft­ware, the end­less hacks for vir­tu­al­ly every­thing, and the avail­abil­i­ty of free online com­put­er class­es, that seems like kind of a lame admis­sion. So I’m tempt­ed to rec­ti­fy my pro­gram­ming igno­rance by push­ing through what promis­es to be a rig­or­ous intro to com­put­er sci­ence, CS50, Harvard’s intro­duc­to­ry course for both majors and non-majors alike. The course offers a broad knowl­edge base to build on, as you can see from the descrip­tion below:

Top­ics include abstrac­tion, algo­rithms, encap­su­la­tion, data struc­tures, data­bas­es, mem­o­ry man­age­ment, secu­ri­ty, soft­ware devel­op­ment, vir­tu­al­iza­tion, and web­sites. Lan­guages include C, PHP, and JavaScript plus SQL, CSS, and HTML. Prob­lem sets inspired by real-world domains of biol­o­gy, cryp­tog­ra­phy, finance, foren­sics, and gam­ing. Designed for con­cen­tra­tors and non-con­cen­tra­tors alike, with or with­out pri­or pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence.

Har­vard has made this course avail­able free to anyone—via YouTube, iTunes, and the course page—with a series of lec­tures filmed dur­ing the Fall 2011 semes­ter. The class is led by David J. Malan, an enthu­si­as­tic young pro­fes­sor and Senior Lec­tur­er on Com­put­er Sci­ence at Har­vard, and him­self a prod­uct of Harvard’s Com­put­er Sci­ence pro­gram. Pro­fes­sor Malan has also offered Harvard’s CS50 as a MOOC through edX. In the intro­duc­to­ry lec­ture to CS50 (above), Malan promis­es that “this is one of those rare cours­es that actu­al­ly squeezes your brain so much and your sched­ule so much that by the end of the semes­ter you actu­al­ly feel smarter.”

Pro­fes­sor Malan has become some­thing of a hot shot at Har­vard. His mission—to make com­put­er sci­ence more acces­si­ble and far less daunt­ing. He’s done this in part by gen­er­ous­ly mak­ing sev­er­al of his cours­es avail­able free online to non-Har­vard stu­dents. In addi­tion to CS50, Malan offers the fol­low­ing cours­es for those who want to pur­sue pro­gram­ming or web design fur­ther:

• Build­ing Dynam­ic Web Sites — iTunes — Video & Audio
• Build­ing Mobile Appli­ca­tions — iTunes — Web Site
• Under­stand­ing Com­put­ers and the Inter­net — iTunes — Web Site
• XML with Java — iTunes — Web Site

And if you still need some sell­ing on the val­ues and virtues of com­put­er sci­ence, watch Malan below deliv­er an inspir­ing talk called “And the Geek Shall Inher­it the Earth” at Har­vard Thinks Big 2010 (Harvard’s ver­sion of TED Talks).

We’ve added Har­vard’s CS50 to the Com­put­er Sci­ence sec­tion of our list of 750 Free Online Cours­es and our list of 150 Free Busi­ness Cours­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­put­er Sci­ence: Free Cours­es

Codecademy’s Free Cours­es Democ­ra­tize Com­put­er Pro­gram­ming

Learn to Build iPhone & iPad Apps with Stanford’s Free Course, Cod­ing Togeth­er

Josh Jones is a writer, edi­tor, and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness