

Stanford Introduction to Databases Course, Winter 2013 edition, starts today - ingve
http://class2go.stanford.edu/db/Winter2013

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henrik_w
I took this course a year ago, and really enjoyed it. I never took a data base
course at university, but I've been using some SQL over the years. Getting the
theoretical grounding was quite useful, and also seeing all the ways queries
can be composed. And, professor Widom has a good sense of humor.

I still can't get over that all these courses (Coursera, Udacity, EdX etc) are
available for free. Just amazing!

I've written about my impression of the course in more detail here:
[http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-
databases-...](http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-on-
line-learning-done-well/)

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clyfe
I took this a while ago. The quality is exceptional and the explications very
good and intuitive. Can't recommend it enough for people who want to learn
about databases.

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uses
I took this course in Fall 2011. I learned quite a bit about many facets of
SQL. At the time, it didn't offer much in terms of NoSQL, except to explain
what NoSQL systems _don't_ offer.

I've been a web developer for 7 years, and although I write SQL every day, I
never took a DB course during my CS degree.

This course taught me about the database features which had always been
mysterious, such as transactions, triggers, and relations. It also gave me
some formal knowledge, which was the hardest part of the course.

Their online exercise system was fun to use and the tests were reasonable.

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chesh
For me this is the best of the online courses. Jennifer Widom has a fantastic
teaching style, and the conversational presentations are far more effective
that recorded lectures. The exercises were good an challenging. I took the
original course, and the one area I gave feedback that needed improvement were
the forums. The new forums run by Piazza seem to be a big step forward.

It was so good that I will take a refresher and try to find time to do more
exercises.

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ommunist
Course topics look lucrative, but the introductory survey is only accessible
from desktop, not from tablet or mobile. Strange to see this happening, taking
into account the huge population of folks at Stanford who are capable to write
on the Internet.

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huherto
Is this identical to the coursera class? This link was working just a few days
ago, and today I couldn't find it. <http://www.coursera.org/course/db>

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m0nastic
Yes, it looks the same (I actually still see it on Coursera, but the link
takes you to this site).

I'm not sure if maybe they decided for the second time offering the class to
do it themselves (I am now "enrolled" at about a half-dozen different online
course websites, it's actually a little bit of a pain to manage them all).

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suyash
Thanks for sharing. I just enrolled!

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DavideNL
Would be nice if this was available on iTunes-U.. guessing it won't be?

