CS50P: Introduction to Programming with Python: study plan and how long it takes
The CS50 playlist is 11 videos and 15.9 hours long. Here's how long it takes at different paces, a week-by-week schedule built from the real videos, and a planner that turns it into your own daily plan.
11 videos · 15.9 hours · CS50
CS50P is Harvard's free introduction to programming with Python, taught by David J. Malan. Ten lectures cover functions and variables, conditionals, loops, exceptions, libraries, unit tests, file I/O, regular expressions, object-oriented programming and a final 'et cetera' tour of more Python features.
Each lecture is long, around 90 minutes to almost three hours, and comes with problem sets and a final project on the CS50 site.
Who it's for: Complete beginners who want a rigorous, well-produced first programming course, and CS50x students who want more Python.
How long does it take?
The full playlist is 15.9 hours across 11 videos. Here's roughly how many days that is at different daily watch times and speeds, counting video time only:
| Daily time | At 1x | At 1.5x | At 2x |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 min a day | 32 days | 22 days | 16 days |
| 1 h a day | 16 days | 11 days | 8 days |
| 2 h a day | 8 days | 6 days | 4 days |
Make your own schedule
The playlist link is already filled in. Press Plan, set how much time you have each day and your speed, and you'll get a day-by-day schedule with a finish date and a calendar file. It reads the live playlist, so new videos are included.
Week-by-week schedule
A sample plan at 1 hour a day and normal speed, using whole videos so none is split across days. That's 2 weeks in total. For a different pace, start date or speed, use the planner above.
Week 1Videos 1–7 · 7h
Day 1 · 4m
- 1CS50P - Introduction4m
Day 2 · 1h 46m
- 2CS50P - Lecture 0 - Functions, Variables1h 46m
Day 3 · 56m
- 3CS50P - Lecture 1 - Conditionals56m
Day 4 · 1h 21m
- 4CS50P - Lecture 2 - Loops1h 21m
Day 5 · 45m
- 5CS50P - Lecture 3 - Exceptions45m
Day 6 · 1h 17m
- 6CS50P - Lecture 4 - Libraries1h 17m
Day 7 · 51m
- 7CS50P - Lecture 5 - Unit Tests51m
Week 2Videos 8–11 · 8h 54m
Day 8 · 1h 32m
- 8CS50P - Lecture 6 - File I/O1h 32m
Day 9 · 2h 5m
- 9CS50P - Lecture 7 - Regular Expressions2h 5m
Day 10 · 2h 48m
- 10CS50P - Lecture 8 - Object-Oriented Programming2h 48m
Day 11 · 2h 29m
- 11CS50P - Lecture 9 - Et Cetera2h 29m
Tips for finishing
- Plan one lecture a week and do the problem sets in between; that's how the course is designed.
- The OOP lecture (video 10) is the longest. Give it two sittings.