Software

Computer Science

The field itself — how to get into it, and the maps people drew on the way through.

Books

Foundations of Information (Book) — Amy J. Ko’s free online textbook on what information really is, from encoding and data structures to information’s tangled role in science, democracy, and sustainability.
Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation (Book) — Pharr, Jakob and Humphreys’ rendering textbook, free online and winner of a 2014 Sci-Tech Academy Award; written as literate programming, so radiometry, Monte Carlo integration, reflection models, and volumetric scattering each arrive with the pbrt source that implements them.
Ray Tracing in One Weekend (Book) — Peter Shirley, Trevor David Black and Steve Hollasch’s course notes rewritten as a build-along in C++: PPM output, a camera, ray–sphere intersection, an abstraction for hittable objects, antialiasing, then diffuse materials and recursive bounces. Released CC0, and continued in The Next Week and The Rest of Your Life.

Linux Journey (Course) — Cindy Quach’s free Linux course, started in 2015 and now maintained by LabEx after linuxjourney.com stopped resolving on its own. Lessons are graded Grasshopper (the shell, text-fu, permissions, processes, packages) → Journeyman (devices, filesystem, boot process, kernel, init, logging) → Networking Nomad (TCP/IP, subnetting, routing, DNS), with a real Ubuntu terminal in the browser to try them in.

AI Expert Roadmap (Website) — six MIT-licensed charts laying out the routes into data science, machine learning, deep learning, data engineering, and big data, drawn by AMAI to onboard their own hires; the Data Science branch runs probability theory → distributions → summary statistics → estimation → hypothesis testing, with every node linking out to something to read.