Software

Computer Science

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

Books

A Primer on Bézier Curves (Book) — Pomax’s free website-book on the maths and programming of the curve behind Photoshop paths, CSS easing functions and font outlines, maintained since 2011 and translated in part into Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian and Korean. Its 45 sections run from de Casteljau’s algorithm through derivatives, arc length, curvature, intersections, curve fitting and B-splines, with interactive graphics throughout and example code written as pseudo-code on purpose.
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.

Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle (Article) — Peter Norvig’s 2006 walkthrough of a Sudoku solver in about a page of Python, built from two ideas: constraint propagation (assigning a digit eliminates it from that square’s 20 peers; a unit with only one place left for a digit gets it) and depth-first search over whichever square has fewest candidates remaining. It clears 95 hard puzzles at 0.04 seconds each, and the closing section on a random puzzle that took 1,439 seconds is a small lesson in heavy-tailed runtimes. A Python 3 notebook version is linked at the top of the page.

Ben Eater (Channel) — tutorial videos on electronics, computer architecture and networking, all built on breadboards: a programmable 8-bit computer assembled from simple logic gates, a 6502 machine that ends up running Wozniak’s Apple 1 monitor and Microsoft BASIC, a VGA video card, and a digital clock. Schematics and parts lists are on eater.net.