vistakric

I'm an undergrad who's taken a single linear algebra course, gotten through the first round of multivar calculus and statistics. I found the link below to be a really good outline, and impetus for further googling. Basically, I'll read through it, and whenever I don't recognize a term, I'll spend an hour or two going through that term, and then return to this link for some contextualization of whatever the hell it is that I just read!

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pift6266/H10/notes/mlintro.html

Will second the pro version thought - IIRC, the app is like 2.99, but a bargain at that.

OH I ALMOST FORGOT - Paul's Online Math Notes!!! That site got me through high school maths!

Ok, everybody is recommending different content sites, so you've got places to go to find specifics. That's good. But you also need a way to figure out what you already know, what you want to know, and which order is best to learn stuff in so you're not confused. For instance, you'd better have a decent understanding of trigonometry, geometry, and pre-calculus before you try tackling calculus. The hardest part about self-learning isn't trying to find tutorials for what you want to learn, it's figuring out how the specific topic you're working on can be contextualized in terms of other topics in the same subject area.

To figure that out, the most helpful thing I've found is looking at example 4-year plans at colleges (and, if they're available, even for some high schools when it comes to the fundamentals of a subject I never took), and, for online any given online course, seeing if there are any recommended prerequisites or co-requisites.

As an afterthought to all that, my favorite tutorial sites are like, HyperPhysics for physics, MIT open courseware for CS topics, HowStuffWorks for general tech-y knowledge (say, if I wanted to learn how a capacitor or a web server worked). If I'm going to google for good tutorials, I usually include something like "tutorial", "introduction", "primer", "layman's guide", or "cheat sheet". I find that even if I'm looking for an in-depth learning experience, the tutorials that are written to be simple will do the best job of emphasizing what's important, and laying out the way that somebody who "knows how to do it" will approach a problem.

Do I think that it is a good startup model (i.e. something that is likely to get used a lot and/or generate profit)? Yes. Do I think that it is conducive to the goal of acquiring the problem-solving skills to hack something together? Maybe, maybe not.

One of the challenges that a novice developer needs to face and overcome more or less independently is the challenge of making sense of something that looks totally foreign with minimal guidance, and figuring out how this new piece of software fits within their understanding of computing as a whole. This independent contextualization allows the budding developer to know when it is appropriate to use a new tool, whether or not a tool does its job (and how well), and what to watch out for in order to avoid bugs in dependent software.

Another crucial thing to being a good programmer is learning how to teach yourself. If a would-be developer goes out, gets a CS degree, and stops learning thereafter, they might as well be frozen in the year in which they graduated. New tools come out all the time, and it's important to know how to sift through documentation (rather than relying solely on tutorials), how to find good explanations of new concepts, and how to get questions answered without necessarily having a buddy or professor on hand who can definitively resolve the issue for you.

I think that your idea would be really helpful to organize the especially good resources on certain topics by increasing difficulty, but at the same time, I think that it could be a bit of a crutch. Learning how to self-teach sucks because it's hard, so a startup like you're describing could provide an easy way out that would catch up to users sooner or later when they need that skill.