CS50’s Web Programming Course FULL REVIEW

CS50's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript Course Review

If you have been following this blog and/or my Youtube channel, you know how big a fan I am of CS50’s original course — Introduction to Computer Science.

CS50's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript - https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-web-programming-python-and-javascript?delta=0
CS50's Introduction to Computer Science - https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x

After finishing that course, to my delight, I saw that they have many other follow-up courses such as their CS50’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python as well as this one, CS50’s Web Programming with Python and JavaScript, which is the topic of this review.

Just like the previous course, CS50 Web is divided into 8 “weeks” (I like to think of these as just ‘sections’, as you can spend any time you want with each), each consisting of a roughly 2-hour video lecture, accompanying lecture notes as well as a project which applies the contents learned in that week’s materials.

As you’ll see, this time the projects are much more substantial than the original CS50’s problem sets.

This is also the biggest difference compared to the original CS50. The projects are much more involved and difficult, often taking me several days each to complete. But I think this is actually a very good thing, for several reasons which I will discuss a bit later.

You’ll essentially learn how to build full web applications on your own using the Django Python framework. In fact, you’ll already build several of these during the course.

To my initial disappointment, another difference from CS50 is that CS50 Web is not taught by the renowned David Malan, but instead by CS50’s assistant teacher Brian Yu.

This disappointment was quickly forgotten as I got used to Brian’s equally engaging and intuitive teaching style. Just like David, he explains concepts extremely clearly and in a way that makes you genuinely excited about the topics.

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