I was wondering if the HN community could suggest resources that might be helpful for getting over the hump on understanding theoretical CS.<p>To provide perspective, I'm a first year master's student in CS with a focus on cybersecurity. We are all required to take what is basically an advanced automata course. Undergrad automata was a while ago, and while I'm getting my feet again with DFAs and NFAs and regular expressions, I'm getting more and more lost as we move to more advanced material that either wasn't covered in undergrad or was only touched upon.<p>Thanks!
Check out the Open Source Society University's Computer Science learning path:<p><a href="https://github.com/ossu/computer-science" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ossu/computer-science</a>
There's some undergrad DFA recorded lectures/notes here from CMU <a href="https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/#orgc8f0258" rel="nofollow">https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/#orgc8f0258</a> specifically this <a href="https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%22bcf8243e-cf18-481f-960f-3c5b26fbb69b%22&maxResults=50" rel="nofollow">https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...</a><p>Regular Expressions I learned from these course notes on matching/staging (assume you know basic set theory notation) <a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15150/previous-semesters/2012-spring/lect.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15150/previous-semesters/2012-spring/...</a> and the accompanying chapters in <i>Programming in Standard ML</i> by Robert Harper <a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/isml/book.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/isml/book.pdf</a> where you debug regexp
An alternative to the books and links posted here could be to find someone who can help you with your "basic" CS doubts? Kind of a hire-a-CS-tutor, who could provide you with the necessary information, teach you something and eventually pointing the way forward..<p>As a CS professor myself I've been entertaining this idea for a part-time thing, but I don't know how many people could be interested on a service like this.
Intro to theory of computation by Sipser is good.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Michael-Sipser/dp/113318779X" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Micha...</a>
Coursera has many excellent courses which I would recommend once you start diving into advanced applications. If your professors have a coffee-circle "Let's discuss a research paper once a week" get-together, I'd highly recommend attending. Even if you don't get a paper completely, it's really nice to give other people a brief on what it's about, and you end up learning a lot of really great stuff. It's a good way to get up to speed. Not really online resources as you're looking for, but thought I should mention it.