“Essentials of Garbage Collectors” full course is now available | Hacker News Reader

“Essentials of Garbage Collectors” full course is now available

dmitrysoshnikov.com

I went to buy it and first it said the price was 140 NOK, but after I add it to cart and sign in to my existing Udemy account it wanted to charge me 165 NOK.

That’s not a huge difference, and I know these things are beyond your control. But that’s the sort of thing that makes me decide not to buy.

I wish Udemy weren’t so weird about their prices. Change the price and make it more expensive because I log in. No thanks, Udemy.

Yeah, this is something I completely agree about Udemy's policies. Alas, as you say, I unfortunately don't have any control over their price changes.

What are your reasons for publishing on Udemy? It appears to me like the down sides vastly outweigh the advantages.

It's actually a good question. Udemy was just easy to setup, and with no subscription monthly fee. I'm considering cross-publishing it on other platforms as well. I'll be OK in general with monthly fees for publishers once I have several courses. Do you have suggestions for better platforms?

You do.You can opt out from those massive price drops,where all thr courses become 9.99 or so. Whether it will work or not, I'll leave it for your marketing strategy to decide.

Good point, I should take a look if it's easy to just opt-out. I'd be OK with these discounts in general, though they look really weird -- the course was just published, and is already "on (massive) sale" :)

Interesting.. I clearly remember the opt-out checkboxes when I was creating the course, but I don't see them anymore neither in the course, nor in profile settings. I can only change the price, but not to opt-out from the price drops. Will clarify with Udemy support.

Consider yourself lucky. It shows 114,99 EUR price to me.

Had the same - try incognito mode of your browser. I guess referral link or smth like that is lost if you have ad or tracker blocker.

In the words of Strong Bad[0], "That is not a small number! That is a BIG number!"

[0] - https://youtu.be/La9SmiFyLFw

I'm not really interested to buy at the moment, I clicked just to see price after seeing comments on price ... and the result is : 10,99€ (114.99€ with a special -90% offer available for only 4 days)

Seems to be a lottery.

Yeah, I should probably just set the fixed price for future course (didn't know Udemy such aggressively drops the prices back and forth). Though, it'll be 114.99 for the original price, so it's great you were able to win this lottery for 10.99 :)

Are you allowed to sell outside Udemy? I appreciate they give you perks like discoverability. But can I send you cash for a zip file?

I'll see if I can just put the course on another platform with stable prices. Maybe even on vimeo or something, so it's possible to buy just individual lectures to be more flexible. Though, if you got a good price now from Udemy, this probably works too.

Available now on Teachable as well: https://dmitrysoshnikov.teachable.com/p/essentials-of-garbag...

If I remember correctly, course publishers only get a significant amount of money if people buy them through their links and virtually nothing if they discovered them through the platform.

Edit: Here's the revenue share page: https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/229605008-Instru...

This weird revenue share model along with the "This is 96% off, only today, even though it's never been sold for the stated original price" dance is why I will avoid Udemy at every chance I get.

Is it possible to get this course in any other way?

Yes, that's a good question about Udemy's policies. I was also surprised it's got on massive sale right after publishing, lol. I'll consider publishing it on other platforms as well. Do you have good recommendations?

"Udemy weren’t so weird about their prices" I am huge Udemy fanboy (tool). Just wait. Just sit there and wait for the price to drop to $9.99. That is what Udemy is training their customer base to do.

Current price is 10.99usd for the next 4 hours.

Edit: Logged in and the price bumped to 12.99usd.

Now available on Teachable as well: https://dmitrysoshnikov.teachable.com/p/essentials-of-garbag...

Looks good.

Can you also share, which new topics/lectures are u going to cover? Any roadmap for this course in mind?

Do you also have any hands on coding exercises?

Lacks content and some exercises..for now.. definitely will keep eye on this.. will buy..

@ameyv, thanks for the feedback!

Yes, there will be more courses related to implementation of programming languages: Automata Theory, Theory of Parsing, Essentials of Interpretation, and others.

There are some lab sessions for the Garbage Collectors class, e.g. Writing a Memory Allocator from Lecture 6, where we implement an allocator similar to `malloc` function: http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/compilers/writing-a-memory-alloca...

As to materials, yes, there will be an accompanying book for this course.

Hi Dmitry,

Bought! Will provide feedback and review :)

Will looking forward to book and more content in this course.

Hey ameyv, awesome, thanks! Will appreciate your feedback on the course page.

Udemy coupon to avoid surge pricing.

Try LearnNow (for old account) or FTV06RESTDEAL11 (for new account)

It automatically showed these 2 coupons! See if it works for you guys.

Disclaimer: May have something do with country wise or regional pricing

The cost jumped to 37,99$ and the coupon had no effect. At this price it costs too much. I should have bought it yesterday.

Try in incognito mode.. and with new account. It will not show surge price.

Ah I truly thought this course was about something else and incredibly post modern, I read the headline too literally.

Best of luck!

Garbage collection IRL is very important as well ;)

Liked it! Purchased it! I have been interested in and reading a lot about memory management. Hope this will help.

mangatmodi, great, thanks! Feel free to reach me in case of any questions, and good luck with memory management -- it's a great engineering topic.

I understand that it's a theoretical focus course, but is there any implementation that is/will be available to the audience?

Thanks, yes, all the lectures on GC algorithms (from Part 2 of the course) have a detailed source code implementation. This is done is pseudo-code though, explicitly showing that you can port this implementation to any language you'd like.

As mentioned below in this comments thread, GC algorithms are not only specific to objects in raw heap memory. These algorithms are transferrable to higher-level systems as well.

As to specific implementation, yes, I'm planning to have a GitHub repo with all the algorithms implemented in C++.

Is there any specific book that can be a good companion with this course? What are the primary books that helped you build this course?

Yes, the main book which is recommended for the course is "The Garbage Collection Handbook". In addition one can read the "Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management", but this one is specific to C++.

Thank you. I've bought the course. Do Udemy provides community forum per course? How would I interact with the community who are taking this course?

Thanks! Yes, Udemy provides sending messages to instructors, though I'm not sure about specifically community per course. You may also contact me directly on Udemy on my website in case of any questions.

Plus, the one which will be the actual companion book for this course (the same 16 chapters as a book with more details) -- "Essentials of Garbage Collectors", and which I'll try adding soon.

Love the explicit mention that one doesn't need to constrain to C and C++.

Good luck with the course.

There are production garbage collectors written in languages like Java, so this shouldn't be surprising.

It isn't for those of us that actually bother to learn about them, unfortunately still feels like spreading gospel, given the sore state of some education institutions.

Absolutely valid point, that's why I didn't want to stick specifically on C++ (even though it'd be easier specifically for raw heap memory).

As mentioned about though, GC algorithms can be transferred to higher-level system as well. For example, here is a basic Mark-Sweep algorithm implemented in JavaScript on JS objects in a collection: https://gist.github.com/DmitrySoshnikov/4391763

Garbage collection algorithms are also applicable outside of in process memory management.

I wrote a copying collector against a KV store in Clojure that I ran in prod for a while, though I swapped it out for a generational mark and sweep in Java.

I'm sure somewhere, somehow, somebody has written a GC in Excel serving some kind of business need.

Great point, and the example. Exactly, the GC algorithms are a high-level abstraction, which can be transferred, and applied on higher-level systems.

Garbage collection algorithms can be used for other thinks than pure memory management. Each time you have dependencies between objects and want to remove some objects which are not useful any more, you can use a similar algorithm to make a clean up function which has a visible impact for the user of the software. (example: removing points not used by any shape in a drawing software)

Why did you choose to go with Udemy?

Let me know if there's any good alternative to Udemy. I'm also working on publishing a course

If you are happy to do your own marketing,try LearnDash.

Sure;! I will try

As mentioned above in other comments, Udemy was just easy to setup, and doesn't have monthly subscription fee. In general I'll be fine with the fee, so I'm considering other platforms for this and future courses. Let me know if you have good recommendations.

What about https://teachable.com?

Yeah, creating a course there now :)

Available now: https://dmitrysoshnikov.teachable.com/p/essentials-of-garbag...

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