What is bioinformatics?

This repository is a free, self-taught curriculum for learning Bioinformatics, put together by the Open Source Society University. It lays out a full four-year course sequence that anyone can follow at their own pace, using free online courses from universities like MIT, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins. The project is now archived and no longer actively updated, so some course links may be out of date. The curriculum is organized by year. The first two years cover the foundational science and math you need, including biology, chemistry, calculus, statistics, and introductory programming in Python and Java. The later years move into more specialized topics like molecular biology, cell biology, genomics, and a dedicated Bioinformatics series on Coursera. There is also an optional extension year covering machine learning and a genomic data science specialization. Each course listing includes an estimated duration and weekly time commitment, so you can plan your schedule. The guide recommends completing courses in order, since later material builds on earlier subjects. A community existed around this curriculum on Slack, though as an archived project that community may no longer be active. This is not software you run. It is a study plan, a curated list of links pointing to courses hosted on platforms like Coursera, edX, MIT OpenCourseWare, and Udacity. The target audience is anyone who wants to move toward working in bioinformatics without paying for a traditional degree program.