Harvard CS50 course in Russian: 3 and 4 lectures appeared

400 thousand views and a letter from Harvard

Last week, we completed the translation of the 3rd and 4th lectures of the Harvard CS50 Programming Basics course, put them online and immediately ran into good news: our translation partner, Vert Dider studio, received a letter from Harvard!

“We recently noticed that JavaRush has already uploaded the Russian-language version of our CS50 course to the network. Based on the comments, the translation turned out to be of very high quality, and a large number of people have already managed to watch the videos. This is just great! We are very pleased with the fact that education is becoming available to people all over the world. ” - stated in the letter.
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Original letter:



What is there to confess, is not childishly inspiring!

And indeed, the Russian-speaking community met the results of our work very cordially (400,000 views and good reviews are direct evidence of this), and those who still remained unhappy mostly complained about the excessive simplicity of the first lectures and not the most academic in the ideas of “ours” people feed.

Seriously - not equal to boring



The first two lectures are really very easy (read more about the first lecture here , about the second one here ). They are read at Harvard and Yale in the so-called “zero,” that is, introductory week. Their purpose is an elementary introduction to computer science for students with any level of training. Therefore, in addition to explaining the binary number system and the concept of the algorithm, the first programs are proposed to be done in the “childish” visual language Scratch. In addition, everything is served in the style of an exciting show that some users do not fit with academic education. But if you think about it, is it bad? We just got used to the idea that serious education is a boring thing.

We hurry to assure you: it is not necessary at all, and the CS50 course is a living proof of that. Immediately after the opening week, the first begins (the third and fourth lectures), and with it the serious work, but the fascination of the lectures remains at the same level (and for those who were too easy, it becomes even more interesting). Students issued for processing a solid layer of material.

Lectures 3 and 4: Starting to Learn C

It would be more correct to say not the C language, but the basics of C programming. See what a CS50 student should know by the end of the first week, and not just know, but prove his knowledge in practice:

• Basic Linux command line commands, compiling and running newly created program files with their help in the cloud-based IDE
• A program like “Hello, world” with an understanding of its syntax.
• C libraries, why and how to connect them to their own programs.
• What is a compiler, as it is arranged in C (in general, of course).
• Functions C, arguments and values, void, main function and calling other functions from it.
• Numeric and character data types.
• Data entry and output, output specifiers, placeholders.
• Accuracy when using different data types.
• Arithmetic and logical operators. Modulo division.
• Assignment operator
• If-else conditional expressions
• Switches.
• Do-while, while-do, for loops Infinite loops.
• Bugs and what they lead to.

Of course, most of the topics are presented in an introductory format, but the correct one is introductory and practical: based on the result of the studied person, by the end of the first week creates 3 C programs in which there are cycles, conditions, input and output on the screen, type casting and implementation of a simple, but quite applicable "greedy" algorithm.

It seems to us that for absolute beginners - a great start!

Interesting facts in lectures 3 and 4: the price of bugs, a giant ancient calculator and an explanation of uncertainty from ... Siri

In order not to dry up the lectures too, as a historical introduction, we are introduced to the “huge calculator” Mark 1 - a Harvard design, the first American programmable computer, and in combination the first fully automatic, that is, not requiring direct human intervention, machine. Although punch cards, of course, could be inserted only "pens." This huge programmable adding machine, created in 1941, and launched in 1944. At the moment, "lives" in the Harvard Museum.

They also familiarize themselves with the first fixed bug (we think habrovchane does not make sense to submit it additionally), and in the fourth lecture they demonstrate a short film about how software errors became causes of world catastrophes.



But the video from the fourth lecture, where David Malan asks Siri to clarify his question:



What's next?

Already in the second week of the course (lectures 5 and 6), students study the cycles in more detail, the string type of data, return and delve into the work of functions, learn to catch "bugs", learn about type conversion and arrays. Well, after that, a completely unrealistic thing for beginners happens: they are told the basics of cryptography. Yes, at the simplest level, but at the end of the week, the students themselves implement two quite real ciphers: Caesar and Vigener .

In short, CS50 will not let you get bored in all senses. For those who are not just watching lectures, but taking the CS50 course, we have translated additional materials and tasks for lectures 3 and 4. Everything here - javarush.ru/cs50.html

Follow our announcements. It will be even more interesting!