Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 320 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#121

Post by artimaeis »

carusooneliner wrote: post #82
sampo wrote: post #26

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…

Chiming in with support of this course.

I studied portions of it before I got my first "real" tech job (not a call-center) and it put me on a path straight towards my career as a developer. I go back to the course every year or so and try to pick more gems out of it -- it's truly fantastic.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#122

Post by dannygarcia »

carusooneliner wrote: post #64

Financial markets by Robert Shiller: https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global I wanted to invest better so I took this course to learn the basics of financial markets (I'm a software guy and have zero training in finance). After taking it, not only do I have the basics nailed down but have gained a massive appreciation of finance as a technology that, at its best, mitigates risk and advances society. S…

It's kind of crazy that, at least in the US, personal finance is not taught so much in grade school. I had to do a lot of reading and research now in my late twenties to figure out the best way to manage the RSUs I get at work and how to plan for a home purchase and retirement. It turns out (surprise) that most financial institutions don't have regular investors' best interest in mind. Instead, they see us as customers with value to siphon out over long periods of time.

Understanding how economies work[1], how financial service companies sell products, theories behind volatility and market forces, and how simple portfolio management can be goes a long way to improving an individuals ability to efficiently self-manage their finances.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#123

Post by diyseguy »

favorite: the ancient greeks: good teacher: https://www.coursera.org/learn/ancient-greeks

other favorite: absolutely insightful about Russia https://www.coursera.org/learn/russian-history-lenin-putin

history of the modern world: really good just with headphones: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-world https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-world-2

ancient assyrians: https://www.coursera.org/learn/organising-empire-assyrian-wa...

best was "Social Psychology" by Scott Plous/Wesleyan University. inexplicably gone now from Coursera and internet afaikt

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#124

Post by jamestimmins »

grdvnl wrote: post #19

I took the Programming Languages course on Coursera which is so far the best course for me. It changed the way I learn any new programming language. https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages I see that they have split the course into 2 parts.

Could you expand on how it changed things for you? How did you learn them before vs after?

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#125

Post by wpietri »

jcadam wrote: post #101
sampo wrote: post #26

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…

> Nicest: Andrew Ng, Machine Learning, Coursera. Interesting topic, well-planned material, very well avoids going into the mathy details, but still conveys a feeling of understanding of the topic, so accessible to a wide audience. (Martin Odersky, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Coursera, was almost equally nice, but had some rough edges in the first run.) Have to agree with all of this. I've taken Andrew…

I too loved Odersky's course. It was definitely rough, but having the creator of a language teach a course about it provided insights that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#126

Post by diab0lic »

bitL wrote: post #38
dmytrish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probabilistic Graphical Models, Daphne Koller – the first course in the specialization has a very good and engaging start, but the gap between lectures and problems widens quickly after that (maybe that's why the author boasts about a "challenging" course "not for everyone"). I'm hesitant to take the next course of the specialization.

PGM was brutal... At Stanford straight As students were happy just to pass...

I've been meaning to either take the course or read the book. I'm curious if you've read the book [0] and how you would compare or if you'd recommend one, the other or both.

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-model...

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#127

Post by plafl »

mr_overalls wrote: post #80
dmytrish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probabilistic Graphical Models, Daphne Koller – the first course in the specialization has a very good and engaging start, but the gap between lectures and problems widens quickly after that (maybe that's why the author boasts about a "challenging" course "not for everyone"). I'm hesitant to take the next course of the specialization.

Is PGM still relevant as it was five years ago, given the renaissance in deep learning and other NN techniques?

For me Bayesian networks are a tool of thought and I think it's worthy to learn them in the same way it's worthy to learn to sketch functions with pen and paper.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#129

Post by madflame991 »

jamestimmins wrote: post #124
grdvnl wrote: post #19

I took the Programming Languages course on Coursera which is so far the best course for me. It changed the way I learn any new programming language. https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages I see that they have split the course into 2 parts.

Could you expand on how it changed things for you? How did you learn them before vs after?

> It changed the way I learn any new programming language.

I can say the same and I can offer my reasons: until this course I saw every language like a little island; after this course I understood that programs are just a collection of features: various typing systems, static/dynamic scoping, lazy/eager evaluation, etc. It's a ton easier to learn a new language by identifying these features than by looking at a language as a big blob. This also made me realize that languages are not little disjoint island - they're overlapping a lot instead.

The course was the way I got into racket and other lisps and this allowed me to read SICP. Since then I've been doing all sorts of toy interpreters/transpilers for fun and it allowed me to get an idea of what's happening behind the scenes in real languages. For example, I used to think that closures are magical, but after implementing them as part of the course they were a piece of cake afterwards. You will get a profound satisfaction when you implement call/cc yourself and suddenly you understand how try/catch or generators work.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#130

Post by Malcx »

carusooneliner wrote: post #82
sampo wrote: post #26

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…

Is it this one?

https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/db/2014_1/...

Post reply on HN