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I can't thank you enough, this is really great. I've attempted a lot of videos etc. I really enjoy Shai Simonson's stuff, for example. And it helps me think mor

by ellius 10y ago

I can't thank you enough, this is really great. I've attempted a lot of videos etc. I really enjoy Shai Simonson's stuff, for example. And it helps me think more about things like time &/ complexity, but I've really struggled to find a "path" so to speak. I start losing them and without an application lose interest. So thank you again, I greatly appreciate it.

espeed 10y ago
I remember Shai from back in the ArsDigita days. ArsDigita and OpenACS were one of the first open-source projects I was involved with. Shai was one of the instructors at ArsDigita University -- one of the first CS courses on the Internet. ADuni began as an experiment by Phil Greenspun to see if it was possible to teach non-CS college grads the MIT Course 6 curriculum, compressed into a one-year, accelerated postbaccalaureate CS program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita After the year ended, they released all of the video lectures online. This was back in the late 90s / early 2000s. Back then there was no YouTube, video compression sucked, and broadband was in its infancy so connections were painfully slow . To get the videos, you could try and download the massive video archive, but it took forever and I don't think I ever got the full thing. Finally at some point they started selling and shipping HDDs pre-loaded with the entire video archive. http://aduni.org/courses/ http://aduni.org/courses/ Today we're fortunate to have a lot of high-quality course content available online. Greenspun was one of the pioneers who helped make that happen. We should all be thankful for his foresight and initiative to trailblaze that space. http://philip.greenspun.com http://philip.greenspun.com Prior to ADuni, Phil put all the curriculum online for MIT 6.916 "Software Engineering for Web Applications". It was one of the first serious Web Engineering courses offered anywhere. Several other schools used the material to teach the course in their CS dept. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/old-one-term-web-6916 http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/old-one-term-web-6916 Problem Set 4 was my favorite -- design a Knowledge Management (KM) system using metadata, and then let the computer generate the server-side code for the application automatically. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4 http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4 The material was so new and innovative, it was the thing back in the day -- part of the foundational material programmers used as we were learning to build server-side apps in the dotcom era. The ArsDigita Community System (ACS) was one of the first big Web development toolkits, and it was built on top of AOLserver, a high-quality C server that had an embedded Tcl interpreter running inside. Greenspun is an MIT Lisp hacker, and Tcl is an embeddable language similar to Lisp. And running Tcl directly inside AOLserver was a key innovation because it made server-side scripts fast because it bypassed all the traditional CGI overhead, and it allowed you to make database calls from directly inside the server. All the architecture design choices were documented and explained in detail in "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing," which was required reading at the time. http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ The semester I did the self-study program, Phil had the MIT students take the final exam online via an app built on the ACS. The exam wasn't open to self-study students, but I wanted to take it for my own edification. I had become intimately familiar with the ACS code, and I found a way to to hack into the online system and took the exam under some guest account. I never found out how I did though -- I asked Phil about it one time when he came to Dallas, but he didn't remember. I can't believe that was almost 20 years ago.
- ellius 10y ago
  Those ADuni lectures are actually what I know him from. They're excellent, and I very much admire his teaching. The problem I think is either that I went too far in the lectures without attempting the problem sets, or that I simply didn't have the educational prereqs or a work / hobby application to ground me and keep me working at it. Nonetheless, I very much admire the work and enjoy watching the lectures. If nothing else it gets me in a better headspace when I program. Hopefully I can transition that into learning the actual methods and techniques over time. I will definitely check out the MIT course. I bet that would help me retain it much better. I was also looking at the Math for Electrical Engineering & Computer Science that I think you mentioned in an earlier comment.
  - espeed 10y ago
    The Fall 2010 version of MIT 6.042J Mathematics for Computer Science is a good one (as I recall there are several versions online from different years), and someone from Google is teaching it this year (haven't heard if the videos will be made available online): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LMbpZIKhQ&list=PLB7540DEDD482705B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LMbpZIKhQ&list=PLB7540DEDD...
    - ellius 10y ago
      Thank you again. I really appreciate every bit, it all helps.

by ellius 10y ago

espeed 10y ago

I remember Shai from back in the ArsDigita days. ArsDigita and OpenACS were one of the first open-source projects I was involved with. Shai was one of the instructors at ArsDigita University -- one of the first CS courses on the Internet. ADuni began as an experiment by Phil Greenspun to see if it was possible to teach non-CS college grads the MIT Course 6 curriculum, compressed into a one-year, accelerated postbaccalaureate CS program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita After the year ended, they released all of the video lectures online. This was back in the late 90s / early 2000s. Back then there was no YouTube, video compression sucked, and broadband was in its infancy so connections were painfully slow . To get the videos, you could try and download the massive video archive, but it took forever and I don't think I ever got the full thing. Finally at some point they started selling and shipping HDDs pre-loaded with the entire video archive. http://aduni.org/courses/ http://aduni.org/courses/ Today we're fortunate to have a lot of high-quality course content available online. Greenspun was one of the pioneers who helped make that happen. We should all be thankful for his foresight and initiative to trailblaze that space. http://philip.greenspun.com http://philip.greenspun.com Prior to ADuni, Phil put all the curriculum online for MIT 6.916 "Software Engineering for Web Applications". It was one of the first serious Web Engineering courses offered anywhere. Several other schools used the material to teach the course in their CS dept. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/old-one-term-web-6916 http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/old-one-term-web-6916 Problem Set 4 was my favorite -- design a Knowledge Management (KM) system using metadata, and then let the computer generate the server-side code for the application automatically. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4 http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4 The material was so new and innovative, it was the thing back in the day -- part of the foundational material programmers used as we were learning to build server-side apps in the dotcom era. The ArsDigita Community System (ACS) was one of the first big Web development toolkits, and it was built on top of AOLserver, a high-quality C server that had an embedded Tcl interpreter running inside. Greenspun is an MIT Lisp hacker, and Tcl is an embeddable language similar to Lisp. And running Tcl directly inside AOLserver was a key innovation because it made server-side scripts fast because it bypassed all the traditional CGI overhead, and it allowed you to make database calls from directly inside the server. All the architecture design choices were documented and explained in detail in "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing," which was required reading at the time. http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ The semester I did the self-study program, Phil had the MIT students take the final exam online via an app built on the ACS. The exam wasn't open to self-study students, but I wanted to take it for my own edification. I had become intimately familiar with the ACS code, and I found a way to to hack into the online system and took the exam under some guest account. I never found out how I did though -- I asked Phil about it one time when he came to Dallas, but he didn't remember. I can't believe that was almost 20 years ago.

ellius 10y ago
Those ADuni lectures are actually what I know him from. They're excellent, and I very much admire his teaching. The problem I think is either that I went too far in the lectures without attempting the problem sets, or that I simply didn't have the educational prereqs or a work / hobby application to ground me and keep me working at it. Nonetheless, I very much admire the work and enjoy watching the lectures. If nothing else it gets me in a better headspace when I program. Hopefully I can transition that into learning the actual methods and techniques over time. I will definitely check out the MIT course. I bet that would help me retain it much better. I was also looking at the Math for Electrical Engineering & Computer Science that I think you mentioned in an earlier comment.
- espeed 10y ago
  The Fall 2010 version of MIT 6.042J Mathematics for Computer Science is a good one (as I recall there are several versions online from different years), and someone from Google is teaching it this year (haven't heard if the videos will be made available online): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LMbpZIKhQ&list=PLB7540DEDD482705B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LMbpZIKhQ&list=PLB7540DEDD...
  - ellius 10y ago
    Thank you again. I really appreciate every bit, it all helps.