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Brian Kernighan's Advanced Programming Techniques Class at Princeton

cs.princeton.edu

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Re: Brian Kernighan's Advanced Programming Techniques Class at Princeton

#31

Post by alanctgardner2 »

tikhonj wrote: post #23
maximz wrote: post #19

I'm currently trying to choose between Berkeley (Electrical Engineering Computer Science major) and Princeton for undergrad. Has anyone here gone through the Princeton CS program?

I'm currently at Berkeley EECS. It's certainly a very good program, and they put a ton of effort into undergraduate education. For example, I was recently talking to people at the ParLab about how they developed a rather popular class about parallel programming, so undergraduate education is certainly something of a priority. Ultimately, it really depends on what you're interested in. From my perspective, Berkeley se…

I just want to back this up by saying that I've been exposed a little to some AMP lab projects (Spark, Shark), and they're pretty cutting-edge for the industry. That lab seems to be focused on tackling the same problems industry is actively working on, which is rare at my university. If you're interested in distributed, parallel computing in the vein of MapReduce, I would second Berkeley.

Re: Brian Kernighan's Advanced Programming Techniques Class at Princeton

#33

Post by crm416 »

lyb wrote: post #12

I'm wondering if there are lecture videos.

No lecture videos as of yet, but perhaps eventually. Princeton began a partnership with Coursera last year and the CS department has been relatively active, e.g., our algorithms course is now on the site [1], and I believe that they actually 'flipped' the course over the past semesters, i.e., students were expected to watch the lectures online and typical lecture hours were replaced with professors fielding questions / working through examples.

[1] - https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI

Re: Brian Kernighan's Advanced Programming Techniques Class at Princeton

#34

Post by jamesbritt »

gms wrote: post #3
adamnemecek wrote: post #2

Entertaining font choice for lecture slides.

Comic Sans is the font of choice for CS class lecture slides.

Every deck needs an ObComicSans slide someplace.

(Graph paper or yellow legal-pad background is optional. )

Re: Brian Kernighan's Advanced Programming Techniques Class at Princeton

#36

Post by Myrmornis »

cjh_ wrote: post #29
Myrmornis wrote: post #26

Nit: it bothers me when people call JavaScript a "scripting language". What do they mean?

Dynamicly typed and interpreted, it is one of the many uses of the term 'scripting language' [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout%27s_dichotomy

Thanks, I hadn't heard of Ousterhout's dichotomy. It sounds unhelpful, and like an excuse for users of compiled languages to be supercilious about interpreted languages.

A "scripting language" should, if it means anything, mean a language used for writing "scripts". So it hinges on the definition of "script". IMO, a reasonable definition of script might be something like "A computer program comprising a sequence of commands executed for their side effects, whose primary purpose is neither reusability as a software library nor to act as a robust component of a long-running or frequent process, and therefore may not be thoroughly organized into functions, classes, methods etc."

node.js can be used as a scripting language, but the primary role of javascript is to run in a web browser and implement a GUI with an event loop, which is very different from "scripting", if you accept a definition similar to mine.

Re: Brian Kernighan's Advanced Programming Techniques Class at Princeton

#40

Post by thomasjames »

crm416 wrote: post #6

I'm enrolled in this class now--pretty funny to see it on the front page of HN. For anyone who's interested, the lectures generally consist of very high-level views of various elements of programming; anything from version-control to a C++. IMO the best parts of the lectures are Kernighan's anecdotes: he constantly drops in stories from his time at Bell Labs, and even includes some correspondences and comments from t…

Please ask him what motivated the decision to use Comic Sans in the lecture notes. I'd have loved to read them otherwise.
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