A List of Great Internet Learning Resources

The internet presents to all of us a great opportunity for endless self-improvement and education. Constant learning is, in my opinion, one of the keys to a great life. To share my love of learning with you all, I'm collecting resources that either I found enlightening or intend to use someday.

This list is not for short how-tos, but more comprehensive guides. They will mostly be of areas of interest to me. If you know of a resource you personally found great and more substantial than a single tutorial, please reach out. I love to learn and your suggestions would mean so much to me.

This list is far from complete. I hope to keep adding to it as I find more things.

Computer Technology

NAND to Tetris

"Building a modern computer from first principles." This is one I have not gotten around to yet myself. But I intend to some day. I feel that more programmers need an understanding of underlying hardware, NAND to Tetris presents a very straight forward opportunity to achieve such an understanding.

The Missing Semester of your CS Education

A thing that is quite shocking is that it is very easy for someone to go through an entire computer science degree and come out not knowing how to use common and important tools of the trade like git and ssh. If you are a undergraduate studying CS I suggest you take the time to go over this course. It will make your future seniors happy to see such a well prepared addition to their team.

Practical Deep Learning for Coders

Business

Business is something of a bad word amoung artists and programmers and it's rightly deserved. Many a terrible loss in both worlds has been perpetuated for business reasons. But it is foolish to think that the world can or even should exist without business. "Business" simply means organizing a self-sustaining activity. "Marketing" simply means making people who would enjoy your creation aware that it exists. I would rather see a world where creators embrace these skills and gain the ability to lead their own ventures than shun them, condemning themselves to forever work for the wealth of others.

$0 to $2m ARR With B2B Sales

This guide outlines the basic knowledge of performing early customer development interviews and sales. This means identifying your target market, finding leads, performing outreach first with the goal of learning, then later with the goal of finding people you can help. Sales is also one of these bad words in the minds of many creators. But similar to my first examples, think of Sales as meaning simply "Finding people who I can help".

The Startup Toolkit: The Big Ideas

I have so far found this list to be one of the better collections of Startup advise all in one place that covers a lot of topics. If you are thinking of starting your own digital company and for some reason are averse to buying books on the subject, this is a pretty good free resource. Particularly I recommend the Lean Startup Intro (assuming you have not read the book, the Lean Startup, which you should) and the Talking to Customers section.

Jason Cohen's Entire Blog

This is somewhat cheating my way out of my own rule of trying to link comprehensive guides. Here I'm just throwing a whole blog at you. But Jason Cohen gives some of the best advise I've found for startups.

He ticks the boxes that you want:

Also check out: Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business

Game Design

Self-Training in Narrative Design

Emily Short is one of the most notable creators in the space of Narrative Game Design, and her blog is a treasure trove of valuable resources. On this particular occasion, she built an a collection of previously existing resources that one could use to learn an incredible amount about Narrative Game Design.

Node-Based Scenario Design

(See the follow up series too)

Node-Based Scenario Design is a compelling framework for designing games around the acquiring and application of knowledge. Great for investigation and story-centric gameplay. It evolved out of the author's earlier three clue rule and whilst focussed on table top games is perfectly applicable to all forms of interactive media.

Language Learning

antimoon: How to Learn English Effectively

Stop.

You're probably going to scroll past because you already know english. I'm not linking this for the people who need to learn english, as you clearly can already read my site. I'm linking this for people who want to learn any language.

Yes I'm serious. The reason why I'm highlighting this site is not specifically for the purpose of learning english, but rather for the philosophy about how to learn english.

The biggest thing about attempting to learn a language is that no one knows how to even begin. The secret is that language learning is far more an exercize in consistent effort than in intellect once you know a good approach. Antimoon is one of the better sources out there that covers the philosophy I have used myself.

Read the site. Disregard english specific advise. Identify what seems true for all langauges. Check out the other articles section too.

Harry gefangen in der Zeit

Harry gefangen in der Zeit is perhaps the best kickstart for learning German I have encountered. It is 100 episodes, each shorter than ten minutes in length, with accompanying PDFs (that you should read). It covers a bunch of basic vocabulary and actually quite advanced grammar. If you go over this series you should be pretty well prepared to beginning tackling German, particularly via approaches adovated for by Antimoon above.

Subaki: Yesterday's Grammar Guide

I used this grammar guide to prime my brain with Japanese grammar concepts before beginning to dive into the language. This is exactly the way it is intended to be used. You are not supposed to try to memorize anything, but just prime yourself with the idea, such that when you encounter the grammar in your language input experiences your brain is already prepared to receive them. I have found this to be the true path to language learning. The only real exercize is your ability to recognize things in real language. Have your priming phrase, then get to it.