beginners

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

WIRED's 5 Levels format with Jacob Collier explaining harmony to a child, a teen, a college student, a professional and Herbie Hancock.

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.

Nicolai Josuttis's CppCon 2018 talk walks through the many forms of initialization in C++, including uniform initialization, and how their rules and effects differ. He argues the situation is confusing enough that nobody can say what to teach beginners.