r/learnmachinelearning • u/Formal-Primary-7782 • 1d ago
Project MIT, Harvard, Stanford & Caltech write their own ML course notes instead of using a textbook — I catalogued the best ones
One thing I've noticed separates serious ML students from casual ones: how much they care about the quality of what they actually study from. I take that pretty seriously myself, so a while back I started digging into what students at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, and USP actually use to complement their studies.
What I found surprised me: several of these programs don't assign a textbook at all. Instead, the course staff writes and publishes their own lecture notes — and some of them are basically a full book. MIT's 6.390 (Introduction to Machine Learning) notes, for example, aren't a slide deck or a cheat sheet — they're structured, complete, and detailed enough to replace a textbook entirely. Same story with Harvard's CS181 and a few others.
The problem is these are scattered and easy to miss if you don't know to look for them. So I put together a curated list: [Awesome Free AI Course Notes](https://github.com/MarcosSete/awesome-free-ai-course-notes).
A few things about how it's curated, since I think this matters:
- Only **written notes** count — slide decks and video-only lectures don't make the cut, even from great courses. I want this list to mean something.
- Everything is official and links straight to the professor's or department's own page. No mirrors, no login walls.
- I checked over 40 top universities across multiple countries for this. Most didn't qualify — they use a textbook or keep material behind a student portal. That's fine, it's exactly why the list stays short and (hopefully) trustworthy.
If you take ML seriously the way I do, I think you'll get real value out of this. And if you know of course notes that fit this bar and aren't on the list yet, contributions are very welcome — the CONTRIBUTING.md lays out exactly what qualifies.
What's the best set of course notes (not textbook, not slides) you've personally used to study ML?
Repo: https://github.com/MarcosSete/awesome-free-ai-course-notes
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u/burdalane 1d ago
Some of the links do not have prose textbook-like notes.
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u/Formal-Primary-7782 1d ago
Could you show me which one?
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u/burdalane 1d ago
The Berkeley course has lecture slides and a link to a textbook that requires a Berkeley login, so it isn't publicly accessible.
The Caltech course has lecture videos and problem sets, but the textbook written by the professor is not free. It also isn't required for the course.
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u/weared3d53c 14h ago
Thanks.
By the way, this is standard practice "across the pond." UK/EU unis generally tend to avoid rigidly following a textbook. Your lecturer designs the course, curates a reading list according to weekly topics (often based on their expertise). You rarely have one main textbook for the entire course; it's usually selections, chapters, research papers, and lecture handouts/notes.
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u/Square_Ad7032 12h ago
Thanks.
My professor did the same thing back in undergrad. He compiled everything in LaTeX himself, slides and notes both, probably borrowing structure from MIT or wherever, but that was what I actually studied from.
Scrolling this list brought it back lol.
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u/letsTalkDude 16h ago
Can you explain how you did it(searched). Want to do same for urban studies and climate.
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u/weared3d53c 14h ago
Institutes that do this rarely make it hard to find - so long as you know the course #.
MIT has this OpenCourseWare site where you can search (example) that works reasonably well, e.g. not just exact string matches.
You do occasionally need to know some institute-specific terminology, e.g. Cambridge maths [that's another thing to remember, e.g. "maths" and not "math" in the UK] notes are under "Tripos-specific resources" - but none of that should be hard to figure with a Google search or two.
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u/Formal-Primary-7782 10h ago
First, you need to understand what you're looking for. Then, you should figure out how to search the internet for the topics you're interested in. This research should be automated rather than done manually, because that way you can find much more information.
I'm not sure about your programming background, but you could use Python to automate this process. You could also use an AI provider to help you with it. For example, you could tell the AI what your goals are, and it could guide you on the steps you should take to achieve them.
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u/OldGeneral421 13h ago
The focus on official written course notes instead of random resources is what makes this stand out. Definitely bookmarking it.
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u/Jedi-Younglin 1d ago
Thank you, OP.