// the find
ForrestKnight/open-source-cs
Video discussing this curriculum:
A structured list of free online courses from MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and others that together approximate a CS undergrad curriculum. It's aimed at self-taught developers who want to fill formal gaps without enrolling in a degree program. No code, no tooling — just a well-organized reading list.
The course sequencing is actually thought through — prerequisites chain logically from intro programming through algorithms, theory, and applied topics rather than just dumping links. Source selection is conservative and credible: CS50, Nand2Tetris, Princeton Algorithms, Stanford ML — these are the courses that hold up over time. The scope is honest about what it covers and what it skips (no general education fluff). At 23k stars it has a large enough community that broken links and outdated courses tend to get flagged quickly.
It's a Markdown file with affiliate links, not a project — there's no tooling, no progress tracking, no way to verify you've actually done anything. The course list is starting to show age: several Coursera/edX links use affiliate redirectors that may or may not still resolve, and the Operating Systems course is commented out with no replacement. Heavy Java bias in the programming track, which is an odd choice for someone entering the field in 2025. There's no coverage of concurrency, distributed systems, or compilers — topics a real CS degree would include.