beginning with computer science

[Ajitesh]

Hey guys
I'm planning to enter into computer science, I wanted to know how exactly can I start with it. I have no prior experience and I want to build a strong base so that it becomes easy for me in the future to continue this.
So what are your suggestions as to how should I begin.
Any websites, online lecture or anything that could help me?

Thanks

[Jplus]

Can you elaborate your question a bit? Are you planning to go study CS in college or do you just want to learn about it as a hobby? In the former case, the only sensible advice we can give is to apply for university. In the latter case, it really depends on what kind of thing you want to learn first.

Also, it might help to point out what you've found so far, and why it doesn't meet your requirements yet.

The only 'common base' of computer science that I can currently think of is the Church-Turing thesis. You might want to read about that. Perhaps read about Turing machines first, to make it a bit more digestible.

Finally, there are lots of good books on CS that we could recommend, but again it depends on what you're currently most interested in.

[EvanED]

And don't miss the Resources for leaning the math and science behind computing sticky thread.

[Ajitesh]

I wanna take it as a serious hobby.
I'm more inclined towards designing apps, so I'm interested in learning python, javascript, html5, css3 and others.

[Anonymously Famous]

W3Schools is a pretty good reference resource for a lot of web technologies, including Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3.

[EvanED]

I wanna take it as a serious hobby.
I'm more inclined towards designing apps, so I'm interested in learning python, javascript, html5, css3 and others.

Then look in the coding forum at the couple stickies there like "how do i learn about [n]"

[Xanthir]

W3Schools is a pretty good reference resource for a lot of web technologies, including Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3.

Please, no. W3Schools is one of the worst references on the internet. I had to unlearn a lot of what I picked up from there. See http://w3fools.com/ for more information.

[Anonymously Famous]

Point taken, with reservations. I had been using W3Schools, as, like the page you linked to states, it comes up at the top of search results. Still, I don't feel that I'm really "tainted," but I'll gladly take a look at some of the links provided in the page that you linked to.

[Breakfast]

MIT OpenCourseWare is an excellent resource, especially for you because their introductory class is in python.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-e ... -lectures/

You can find plenty of other classes, and even sometimes lecture notes and homework assignments / projects on there too.

I, personally, don't like python and think that if you want to do application development you should start off with c++ and move into c# / asp.net (MVC). But that is only my opinion and should be taken with a grain of salt. Ultimately you should learn what interests you first and branch out from there.

[DoubleFelix]

I HIGHLY recommend this course, which is still accepting new enrollment!: http://www.udacity.com/
It's free and web-based, and it originated from the (extremely popular) AI course Stanford did a few months ago. I'm following along with CS101 out of curiosity, and it's really high quality so far. I especially recommend it if having extra structure helps you make progress.