I used this course years ago while I was self-teaching CS, really great course. MIT in general makes some awesome stuff available -- so awesome, it helped this disgruntled lawyer get the hell out of law and into my dream field.
I can't express strongly enough how appreciative I am to MIT, and also schools like Stanford and Harvard, and Prof. Sedgewick from Princeton, for making courses like this publicly available.
I’m also a (formerly disgruntled) lawyer eternally grateful to Stanford and MIT for helping me escape. And like you, I cannot overstate my appreciation. If anyone involved in these courses stumbles upon this thread - thank you.
I've been on the other side (CS professor for two years, apparently students really loved my work) - if you can, email them and tell them about your appreciation. It's worth it.
I don't know about others, but in my case I had to put up with a lot of BS, and "older" colleagues that were envious of my "performance" (annual feedback reviews by students). These few emails (and two letters!!) went a long way for me.
Absolutely. One of the older tenured guys at my CS department spent his time playing poker. He blogged about it constantly -- when he wasn't blogging about his yacht which he ran aground. (Eeek!) Another took some of his salary and spent it on a share of a minor league baseball team. He kept talking about how much he loved hanging out with the players, shagging balls in the outfield.
But they kept coming up with excuses about why they couldn't pay me as much as them so I left. Boom. I encourage more professors to leave and more students to check out venues like Coursera and Udemy.
I used these videos to get up to speed on Linear Algebra while taking a grad-level machine learning course. I could not have made it through that course without these videos.
The one I'm currently in, software development. edit: I'm a relatively new arrival here, been paid to do it for ~1.5 years now, so I haven't yet had the opportunity to form a more specific aspirational sub-field.
It's what I should have just done straightaway -- dad's an engineer, his dad was an engineer, half his brothers are engineers -- but I didn't for a variety of personal reasons I won't get into here. I was always fascinated by computers and by prog langs in particular -- a deep curiosity about how text could turn into action, although I wouldn't have framed it like that as a kid. But I was the sort of dork who would check out books on C++ as a 10 year old despite not having access to a compiler or any idea what I was doing. This fascination kind of took a backseat until I was out of law school, working, and slowly realizing how miserable I was at the thought of 40+ more years of what I was doing.
So I took a long and circuitous route to get here, but now here I am, and eternally grateful for these sort of resources. Without them, the switch would have been way more difficult. It already took me 3 years of dedicated work; I can't imagine what I would have done without this stuff freely available. Probably would have had to pay to go back to school.
I can't express strongly enough how appreciative I am to MIT, and also schools like Stanford and Harvard, and Prof. Sedgewick from Princeton, for making courses like this publicly available.