
Udacity Course on Building a Search Engine - mjfern
http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs101
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graeme
I just finished this course. I started learning programming in January.

It struck a very good balance between being accessible to beginners yet still
teaching substantive knowledge. Beginners can learn quite a bit; if they put
in the effort to keep up and make sure they truly understand the concepts.

The format was excellent. Lessons were broken down into short 3-5 minute
videos. Quizzes were frequent and confirmed understanding of the concepts.

I personally _hate_ learning with videos. Fortunately, they included detailed
course notes with each lesson, so I could read through those quickly when I
needed to review.

Finally, each unit came with homework questions, which were graded. Some were
quite easy, but others really made you think (there were some forum complaints
about this).

As a programming newbie, I learned a lot in seven weeks. I'm looking forward
to their new higher level courses.

Having a CS 101 entry point for beginners is really important, and Udacity did
a good job with theirs.

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leh
My girlfriend took the course that started in february and her progress is
absolutely fantastic.

I really recommend all non-programmers to take it if they want to get a grasp
on how cs people think.

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psawaya
That's a very ambitious goal for an introductory CS course. Still, I wonder if
building a search engine is a motivating goal for new programmers these days.
I'm sure it's been tried many times before, but a class that introduced
programming and game development at the same time would, I imagine, be more
exciting to potential programmers.

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diego
I'm biased, but I believe it's a fascinating topic. Many people would love to
know the "magic" behind Google. When I studied Electrical Engineering (late
80s) the two most interesting topics to me were TV and microprocessors. Both
concepts had been around for a while, but I still wanted to know everything I
could about how they worked.

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sigil
Stanford CS276, "Intro to Information Retrieval," also covers most of the
stuff you need to know. In spite of the cruftier name. The textbook is freely
available:

<http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/>

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muyuu
I didn't know about this. What's the model? does it require registration and
attendance? why isn't the material openly available?

Sorry if I'm asking something stupid. I'm not a newbie but I like teaching and
I'd like to know more about their materials and approach.

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dataisfun
Udacity is fantastic. It's the best online CS education I've ever seen.

