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Computer Science

Algorithms and machines, running slowly enough to watch.

8 sites

Write or paste an algorithm and watch it animate against its own data structure, with the code and the picture side by side. Open source, and you can add your own.

Go learnalgorithm-visualizer.orgComputer Science

Computer Science Field Guide

Interactive Textbook

A full introductory CS textbook with an interactive widget wherever one helps — compression, error correction, complexity, cryptography. Written for school but perfectly usable as a refresher.

Go learncsfieldguide.org.nzComputer Science

Distill

Interactive Essay

A machine learning journal built on the premise that interactive figures explain better than static ones. No longer publishing, but the archive remains the best visual writing on neural networks anywhere.

A git sandbox that draws the commit graph as you type real commands into it. Rebasing and cherry-picking stop being frightening once you can see what they do to the tree.

Go learnlearngitbranching.js.orgComputer Science

Start with a single NAND gate and build up: latches, adders, memory, an ALU, then a working CPU that runs your own machine code. The whole abstraction stack, assembled by hand.

Red Blob Games

Interactive Essay

Interactive explanations of the algorithms games actually need — A* pathfinding, hex grids, noise, line of sight. Every diagram is manipulable and the writing is unusually precise.

Go learnredblobgames.comComputer Science

The Nature of Code

Interactive Textbook

Simulating natural systems in code — forces, oscillation, particle systems, cellular automata, evolution and neural networks — with every example runnable and editable in the page.

Go learnnatureofcode.comComputer Science

VisuAlgo

Visualisation

Sorting, graphs, trees, hashing and dynamic programming executing one step at a time on data you choose, with the pseudocode line highlighted as it runs. Built for a real algorithms course.