MIT OpenCourseware Computing Courses

I’ve known about the free materials at MIT OpenCourseware for a while now but procrastination has always gotten the better of me. If you’ve not heard of it I’d give it a gander as there’s a lot of free learning material up there if you’re feeling adventurous.

Apart from having a marathon horror film binge this holiday I’m also starting conquering that procrastination and doing a few computing courses. I’ve already got a degree in software engineering but it feels a long time ago now and it feels about time for a brush up.

Now OpenCourseware is great but most of the courses have huge gaps in the materials. For example many of those listed will have very abstract and cryptic lecture notes that don’t really make sense unless you were at the lecture or have the additional materials they provided. Case in point this image of lecture notes on “phonetics” in the “Introduction to Linguistics” course. This isn’t a quiz/test – these are notes.

So having been scared away from linguistics I chose some courses that had more comprehensive notes and found the following gems:

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – This seems to be an all-rounder for new students to the computing courses at MIT but what I really liked about it was their teaching of Scheme!
• Introduction to Algorithms – I hated algorithms at uni but I wanted to give it another go and this one seems pretty comprehensive.
• Computer System Engineering – This is another course that seems to cover a hell of a lot of ground. From the description: engineering of computer software and hardware systems: techniques for controlling complexity; strong modularity using client-server design, virtual memory, and threads; networks; atomicity and coordination of parallel activities; recovery and reliability; privacy, security, and encryption…..etc.