What this isThe courses on this site are free. These aren't: they're the paid courses, screencasts and zines that HN commenters keep recommending, mostly to people who already program for a living. We list them with the same receipts, criticism included.
Destroy All Software: 146 commenters (2011–2026) · 11 of 20 sampled comments recommend it Execute Program: 48 commenters (2019–2026) · 11 of 20 sampled comments recommend it $29 a month, which covers both
Two products under one subscription. Destroy All Software is a catalog of 121 short screencasts: classic seasons on Ruby, Rails, Unix and Git, and later "from scratch" seasons that build a test runner, a web framework, and tools such as compilers, editors and compression formats. Execute Program is a set of interactive courses on TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL, regular expressions and Python, built from hundreds of small code examples with spaced repetition.
“the developer's Destroy All Software screencasts are what taught me how to write parsers. I must have rewatched that video 30 times while I was writing my first one.”
“It uses interactive exercises + spaced repetition. It's really the only way I've managed to learn Regular Expressions.”
Most HN links to destroyallsoftware.com are to Gary Bernhardt's free talks (Wat, The Birth & Death of JavaScript, Boundaries). They aren't counted here; only comments about the screencasts are.
130 commenters (2014–2026) · 13 of 20 sampled comments recommend it $39 a month or $390 a year; regional pricing offered
A subscription library of over 300 video courses and live workshops, recorded from workshops that subscribers can attend. Mostly JavaScript and web development, with back-end and computer science courses too. The site now redirects its pricing page to master.dev.
“I consider myself an advanced Frontend engineer and I find only Frontend Masters and specialized (and expensive) courses can really help me fill what gaps I do have”
Comments linking only its free Front-End Handbook or blog are not counted.
67 commenters (2016–2026) · 6 of 20 sampled comments recommend it $10–12 each, or all 15 for $145; the black-and-white ones are free
Short illustrated zines on one topic each: how DNS, Git, containers, integers and floats, HTTP and the terminal work, SQL, debugging, and Bash, Linux and networking in the Bite Size series. They're short starting points, not courses.
54 commenters (2021–2026) · 11 of 20 sampled comments recommend it $59.99–$99.99 per course
Long video courses, each one project built from nothing: a 3D software renderer in C (45 hours), compilers and interpreters (27 hours), a 2D rigid-body physics engine, a raycasting engine, a 2D game engine in C++ with Lua, digital electronics and computer architecture, and console programming for the PlayStation (MIPS), NES and Atari 2600 (6502).
“The first thing you do is write a set_pixel function utilizing SDL and the rest of the course is all your code, every matrix operation, every vertex transformation, every triangle rasterization.”
32 commenters (2023–2026) · 8 of 20 sampled comments recommend it $15 a month or $150 a year
A course, published on Substack since 2023, on how fast code can be and why it usually isn't. After a prologue, you read and simulate 8086 machine code, build a profiler, then study how data moves into the CPU, with homework for each part. It's meant to be useful whatever language you write. Some posts are free.
“It's a great course targeting experienced programmers.”
The free "Clean Code, Horrible Performance" post is the most-linked page on the site; comments about it alone aren't counted. Only comments from 2023 on, when the course launched, are counted.
26 commenters (2021–2026) · 9 of 20 sampled comments recommend it Paid; the price is shown at checkout and varies by package
An interactive course that teaches CSS from the fundamentals up: 200 lessons and about 40 hours of content. The same author's The Joy of React is counted with it.
CS Primer: 14 commenters (2023–2026) · 5 of 19 comments recommend it Bradfield: 63 commenters (2010–2024) · 5 of 20 sampled comments recommend it Subscription; HN commenters reported up to $75 a month, depending on location
Self-paced computer science for working engineers, built as a sequence of programming problems with walkthrough videos and feedback: programming beyond the basics, computer systems, algorithms and data structures, operating systems, relational databases and computer networking, with distributed systems still being recorded. It replaces the live classes of Bradfield School of Computer Science, which the same founder ran for eight years.
“I am someone who has a masters degree and I have taken Distributed systems, Computer Architecture and Advanced Algorithms at Bradfield. In my experience, I would rate Bradfield better than a master degree”
CS Primer itself has little HN discussion yet (14 commenters); most of the record is for Bradfield. One frequent poster co-hosts the CS Primer podcast with its founder and isn't counted.
46 commenters (2010–2026) · 9 of 20 sampled comments recommend it
Week-long, small-group courses such as Write a Compiler, Rafting Trip (Raft from scratch) and SICP. His site now says he taught them from 2007 to 2026 and that none are scheduled. Two are free on GitHub under CC BY-SA: Practical Python Programming and Advanced Python Mastery.
63 commenters (2010–2024) · 5 of 20 sampled comments recommend it
Live small-group classes in computer science, started in San Francisco. Its site says it is "on indefinite hiatus" after 8 years and over 1,000 students, and that its classes are moving to CS Primer, above.
How this page was counted
We pulled every HN comment linking each product's site, and every comment naming the product, through HN's Algolia API, year by year from 2008.
A filter then kept only comments about the paid product: links to its paid pages, or its name. A comment linking only free material from the same site was dropped. So were comments from before a product existed, and from the authors' own accounts and one account that co-hosts a podcast with a founder.
One person read a seeded random sample of 20 comments per product and marked each: recommends it, criticizes it, neutral, or not about it. Where fewer than 20 comments remained, all were read.
Quotes are verbatim and link to their comment. A script checks each one against the pulled comment text and the named author.
Candidates we looked at and left out: Handmade Hero (free to watch) and David Beazley's Python Distilled (HN calls it beginner to intermediate).
Everything is in the repository's paid/ folder: the scripts, the pulled comments, the labels and the figures.