111–120 of 320 posts
Amazing course, though it uses Mozart a little known programming language, drives home the functional paradigm in a lucid manner. I am surprised that Peter Van Roy's book (instructor of the course) Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming is not as well known as SICP.
Udacity's Differential Equations course was pretty awesome too. I had taken Calculus previously, but I believe it's pretty approachable even if you haven't. The homework was very well designed, and involved fun problems like computing gravitational slingshots and curing diseases.
Coursera's "The Unwritten Constitution", also has a similar "The Written Constitution". Both are pretty awesome and really gives an in depth view of what the constitution is about (spoiler alert: it's about slavery), and even points out holes that haven't been challenged yet. Homework was writing essays and grading other people's, so not that well designed in that respect.
Coursera's "Coding the Matrix" is a Linear Algebra course. I took it the first time it was offered, and you pretty much had to buy the accompanying book to follow along. And the book unfortunately had a lot of "first version" issues. A lot of the homework wasn't explained very well, but it was all auto graded code. I think the issues with the book have been addressed with the second edition, not sure about the homework. I had already taken linear algebra before, so this was mostly a refresher, but even I found it hard to follow along in the last part, and never completed the last homework assignment.
On Youtube you can find "Fundamentals of Small Arms Weapons" from 1945. It shows how the action of a small arms rifle works. It starts as just a tube with a bullet, and works up to several different types of fully automatic actions. It's just a couple hours long.
Learning how to learn, Barbara Oakley, Coursera. By far and away the best learning course I've taken in my life as well, I wish it had been available before I had completed my formal education.
And if you've never taken any MOOC before this is a great one to start with because: it's only four weeks long and it's free.
Over the past few years, I've watched a few courses on Udacity, Coursera and EdX. I prefer taking ad-hoc courses to fill knowledge gaps (statistics, AI, programming, math, etc.), so I can't give a full review of the complete Nanodegrees, Certificates, XSeries, etc. I usually watch the lessons as needed without completing the entire course; mixing and matching MOOC courses with video learning sites (e.g. Datacamp, You…
Do you have any recommendations on statistics for beginners?
[1]: https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/HumanitiesSciences/Sta...
Any idea on how to start setting aside time to take a MOOC? For those of you taking a MOOC, how do you structure your week? It's been years since I've been in college.
Algorithms by Tim Roughgarden on Coursera
Three Coursera MOOCs I particularly enjoyed: * Discrete Optimization: almost entirely problem-driven, very challenging and entertaining prof; https://www.coursera.org/learn/discrete-optimization * Crypto I: very deep, thorough and crystal clear explanations; https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto * Computer Networks: excellent overall course covering a wide variety of topics; https://www.coursera.org/instructor/~51747…
Computer Networks looks great it's a shame they pulled it down.
Most fun: Pat Pattison, Songwriting, Coursera. Very good lectures, very good material, very well presented. Teaches a lot about writing song lyrics in just 6 weeks, breaks it nicely down to steps and recipes. I used to think that the best feature of MOOCs is the automatic grading and feedback from programming homework, but in this course, for the homework songwriting you gave and got feedback from 3-5 random people i…
> Jennifer Widom, Databases, Stanford. This is not the flashiest of a topic, but oh boy was it well organized. Couldn't agree more. I took this course in 2011 but didn't have a need for working with databases until 2014. Three years after I took the course I was able to jump in and work fluently on databases -- Mongo, Sqlite, Firebase, etc. The least I can say is the course helped me internalize database concepts. Th…
I've now built 2 data warehouses and helped with maintenance on another. It's not my main focus, but it's nice to be able to do it myself when the work calls for it.
I got hired at my first job out of college due to the C# ones and I've been working in C# since then, with a smattering of other languages here or there.