I've decided to take up a few computer science lectures for the hell of it and I'm progressing through Harvard's CS50 introductory course to computer sciences. It's a 12 week, 2 lectures per week, 8 problem sets and a Final project course that you can take online for free. I've also dabbled with a few of those Stanford courses.
have you guys ever tried to follow through with such courses? How useful have you found them in terms of both skills gained and real world results (such as cleaner code, lower dev time, etc.)? Are there any courses that you recommend?
I'd love to hear your feedback because I feel that too many people are jumping into coding without taking any courses - myself included - that should teach the basics and tend to go off of tutorials online, which leads to alot of nonsensical problems. All as a result of the person's methodology because that's how they saw it was done on Youtube or Stack Overflow or whatever other sources.
I really really love that there is material like this! I watched some hours of different (old) lectures, and the quality of the content is very pleasing. My biggest problem is to keep up the motivation of doing such thing on a regular basis (and not suck in hours of material one day and than be stuffed for the rest of the month). So video lectures are only an addition for my interest, not a real source of learning.
Considering that I've taken online only classes at my college and absolutely no videos of lectures were provided at all, and things would have been so much better and easier if they would have been, I'd say they're extremely useful.
Generally, I get As in my on campus classes, and Cs in my online only ones. True, not all classes are the same, but having lectures from the professor is necessary, even if it's just a video online.
Khan Academy saved my life for a differential equations exam a few years ago. I couldn't understand those damned unit step functions until he explained it.
As far as online lectures my professors would post, I never watched a single one. It was always easier just to go through the notes. That's why I always avoided them if they had a complex subject matter. Although if you want an easy A in a general education credit, online courses are the way to go. They seemed to be designed for idiots at my university. Though I suppose that can vary from campus to campus.
For programming I find them to be useful to an extent. I personally find actually working on things to be the most useful when it comes to learning. But both in combination is really the best.
As you stated, people who learn coding only through tutorials or copying other people tend to have really bad habits, not everyone, but a lot. I think taking classes/watching lectures/etc, in addition to online tutorials, leads to better code practices and less small stupid errors.
I've done the Coursera machine learning and compilers courses, and i found both of them interesting and useful (especially the compilers one). The key thing is to keep up with the coursework and tests, because they really help you to ensure that you are understanding the material.