beginner

The first lesson of MangoJelly's FreeCAD 0.20 beginner course, covering setup, preferences and navigation. The series teaches fundamentals through complete workflows such as sketching, Part Design and STL export.

Blender Guru's beginner tutorial series, in which you model, light, texture and render a donut while learning Blender's core features. This is Part 1 of the Blender 3.0 version.

Technology Connections' hour-long guide to electric vehicles, covering costs, trade-offs and especially how little home charging power most drivers need.

A 12-minute beginner lesson from Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking series introducing the Obsidian note-taking app and the first steps to start using it.

A guided Wim Hof breathing session of three rounds at a slow pace, building from a 30 second to a 90 second breath hold. An on-screen bubble animation helps you keep the rhythm.

LifebyMikeG lists 15 common mistakes beginner sourdough bakers make, with advice on fixing sticky, wet dough and other issues.

The introduction to MangoJelly's beginner course for FreeCAD 1.0. The course teaches solid modeling with the Part Design, Sketcher and Part workbenches.

Big Clive gives a 38-minute beginner's guide to identifying common electronic components and what they do. He keeps the maths minimal and aims to fill gaps for people just starting out.

A Linux.conf.au 2013 talk that explains git's internal model using a playful, toy-based approach. It presents git operations as operations on a graph of commits, aimed at people who find git confusing.

Imphenzia's 83-minute tutorial covers the low poly modeling techniques he learned over five years of Blender use, with timestamps from navigation and extrusion onward. It uses Blender 2.83 with default keys.

First lecture of MIT 6.00, an introductory computer science course taught in Python by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. It covers the goals of the course, what computation is, and data types, operators and variables.

A beginner-focused tutorial on freehand knife sharpening with a single stone, aiming for a shaving-sharp edge in about five minutes.

First video in John Bartholomew's Chess Fundamentals series, focused on spotting undefended pieces. He teaches habits for scanning your own and your opponent's position to avoid hanging pieces.

Shawn Hymel of DigiKey introduces KiCad and explains how printed circuit boards are manufactured. It is the first part of a beginner series that builds a 555 badge project.

First lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.

Chess player John Bartholomew plays opponents rated below 1000 on Chess.com and comments on optimal strategy and typical mistakes at that level. It is part of his Climbing the Rating Ladder series.

Andrew Huang teaches the basics of music theory in about half an hour, covering intervals, chords and patterns. He stresses understanding how music works over memorizing terminology.

The first part of Google's Python Class, taught by Nick Parlante, introducing the language and its strings. It is aimed at people with some programming familiarity and comes with exercises.

Felienne Hermans presents Hedy, a gradual programming language for teaching kids that moves through levels from almost no syntax toward full Python. The talk covers why error messages and syntax are scary for beginners.

Dan Wahlin's hour-long beginner course on AngularJS builds a small single-page app while covering SPAs, directives, filters and data binding. It gives an initial grounding in Angular 1.

Microsoft's Brian Beckman gives an hour-long, whiteboard-style walk through monads, building from function composition and monoids using school-level math. It is aimed at practicing programmers rather than category theorists.

A short explainer on the history and mechanics of public key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It uses a mixing-paint-colors analogy to show how two parties can agree on a shared secret in public.

A five-minute clip of Ira Glass on the gap between good taste and early creative work. He says beginners know their work falls short and must keep producing to close the gap.

Dean Friedman's near-hour-long introduction to synthesis, covering the building blocks of sound and the controls on a synthesizer. He slowly adjusts knobs so viewers hear what each parameter does.

Inigo Quilez live-paints a mountain landscape using only math in a shader, building up from a basic polynomial noise surface through fractal terrain, lighting and atmosphere. The code runs in real time on Shadertoy so viewers can edit it as they follow along.

Martin Fowler's GOTO 2012 introduction to NoSQL databases: where they came from, their data models, how consistency thinking differs, and when to use them. He argues they won't make relational databases obsolete and introduces polyglot persistence.

Felienne Hermans's Strange Loop keynote on the history and pedagogy of teaching programming. She questions exploration-only approaches like Logo and discusses research supporting explicit instruction and rote practice.

Techmoan's beginner introduction to the compact cassette, testing metal tapes and Dolby S noise reduction on a Sony TC-S1 deck. He checks whether a cassette can sound close to a CD when good tape and equipment are used.

Scott Wlaschin demystifies functional programming terms like monads, monoids, functors and catamorphisms by showing how they fit into a small toolkit. He applies them to problems such as missing data, list handling, and functional dependency injection.

Veritasium tells the history of how imaginary numbers arose from the quest for a general solution to the cubic equation, including the duels and secrecy among Renaissance mathematicians. It argues math had to give up the requirement that it mirror reality.

Bassist Victor Wooten argues that music should be learned the way children learn their first language: by immersion and play, without early correction or rigid academic instruction. He draws on how babies pick up speech from the people around them.

A Big Think talk in which hedge-fund manager William Ackman goes through the basics of finance and investing in under an hour. It is pitched as a crash course on the most important concepts.

The first of a short series by Welch Labs on building a complete neural network in Python. It introduces the data and the architecture of a simple network before later parts cover forward propagation, gradient descent, and backpropagation.

LearnCode.academy presents a roadmap of web development technologies to learn in 2016 and 2017, spanning front-end, back-end and DevOps tools.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a painting using only mathematics in a shader, building it up step by step. The linked Shadertoy source shows the result.

A roughly three-hour screen recording of designing a barebones STM32F4 board in KiCad, covering schematic, four-layer layout and routing, USB and a buck converter. It ends with ordering manufacture and assembly through JLCPCB.

A two-minute video of Ira Glass on the creative process, describing the gap between taste and skill when starting out and urging you to keep producing until your work matches your taste.

Dave Jones of EEVblog shows hand soldering of surface-mount parts, including drag soldering and tack-and-reflow of 0.5mm fine-pitch ICs, with solder paste and hot air.

A 1970 demonstration of W. Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, teaching a complete beginner to play tennis in about ten minutes. He chats with her, feeds balls and gives positive feedback instead of instruction.

Inigo Quilez shows step by step how to build a simple heart shape from mathematics and shaders, with code on Shadertoy. It is an introduction to procedural graphics and signed distance functions.