Apr 16, 2009

Big4 on YouTube

Recently I noticed that the Big 4 (i.e.MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/CMU) shared a number of their introductory courses online. At first glance, only Stanford and Berkeley actually have a few CS-related ones. MIT shared mostly general engineering/math courses while CMU, the home of robotics and software engineering, has virtually nothing online.

I am watching two courses currently to get some idea of Lisp/Scheme and how the best and the brightest are inculcated true meaning of CS in general :)

Stanford
  • Programming paradigms - a very nice review of a few languages (from Assembly to Python) including four or five lectures on Scheme. The lecturer is very energetic and gives an impression of someone who has real life experience.
Berkeley
  • CS61A Structure and interpretation of computer science - more of a CS course using a Lisp dialect than a language course which arguably makes it even better. The lecturer here is less impressive and at times seems to be too old (incidentally, the equipment is also less shiny than at Stanford .. is there some kind of correlation?). There's also CS61B but it seems to be based on Java (?!) so it is less likely to be of significant interest.
MIT

In addition, there are a couple more courses on subjects such as robotics and machine learning but those have less immediate applicability. So I encourage you to browse their offerings.

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