MIT OpenCourseWare programming lecture videos (in Python) | Hacker News Reader

MIT OpenCourseWare programming lecture videos (in Python)

ocw.mit.edu

160 pointsbitsai27 comments

I checked this out over a year ago and I couldn't go through with MIT OpenCourseWare classes because of lack of subtitles for many of their videos... But now I'm pleasantly surprised to see they added subtitle supports for Python classes! Kudos to MIT for recognizing that there are many disabled/foreign students keen to learn from their OCW materials.

I've watched a few of these, that professor is awesome. He teaches in a very positive way that's clearly understandable. He's the best one I've found on itunes U

checkout harvard's http://cs50.tv (beginning compsci mostly c, not c++) the professor is one of the best i've seen in terms of how enthusiastic he is about the material itself and about teaching it especially to students without much prior experience. You can tell he really loves this stuff and his attitude is infectious.

Definitely! It somehow manages to brush upon C, HTML, PHP, SQL and some Javascript...so you can actually start doing stuff.

A good starting point for CS, imo (and certainly better than the intro to CS course at my college).

Having some free time on my hands lately, I've been cruising iTunesU for stuff like this, it's been pretty great. I can sit in my living room doing work on my laptop with courses from Stanford, MIT or ${reputible_university} playing on my TV. It's amazing how accessible knowledge is these days...

I tried these, but ended up with Google Code Classes: http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ind...

worked better for me.

it's not "Python video lectures", it's "Introduction to Computer science" in which the teacher uses Python, and you can't barely see the code in the videos, so the real potential of these classes is theory (i know, i've seen them)

I think there is a higher bitrate version available for download. You should be able to read code in that one.

Touche; title updated.

... not that i don't love both Python and the vids :) but it was the truth

The disappointing part is that the lecturer talks about handouts that are given to students with the example code he uses during the lectures, which isn't online AFAIK. I find myself taking screenshots of the full screen flash video and replicating code I want to try out myself.

Have you looked at the OpenCourseWare home page for the course or http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... ?

I have looked on the home page and on the various pages, including the readings page and the example code that he uses in class is still not in the online resources.

There is even an OpenStudy page for the course where you can get help: http://openstudy.com/study-groups/MIT+6.0+Intro+Computer+Sci...

Thanks for the link. I'm a self-taught coder of about 13 years now (C, Java, Ruby) and I always feel like there's a few basics I'm missing so I'll probably tackle this after Lisp. Besides, Python has always seemed like a very nice syntax (love when indenting means something but the colon bugs me).

No problem :)

IMHO, Zed Shaw's "Learn Python The Hard Way" (free book) is also really good at teaching both Python and programming:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index

This looks like a great book, I perused it briefly a while back, but I think that if you've been coding for 13 years you're well beyond the level of its target audience.

That's true. Zed's book is for total beginners; people who are just learning how to use a text editor.

Are you a professional coder now? If so, how/when did you start, once you started self-learning?

This is another good resource for similar content. http://academicearth.org/

The videos on that site stutter a lot for me. Probably the fact that I'm on an ancient laptop.

I have nothing but praise for the MIT/SIT for putting their courses online. For an introduction to python and cs, however, I like "Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python" http://pragprog.com/titles/gwpy/practical-programming

Excellent course--as a self-taught coder I used these classes to learn the basics. Great review of common data structures, big-O notation & algorithms, and even some basic coding syntax. HN has a number of lurkers who want to learn to code at any given time--all of them should take this class.

MIT OCW is currently one of my home pages, but it's the series on Algorithms. The other home page is HN of course. Good material no doubt.

My only problem with MIT CourseWare is that the video (audio sometimes) is poor quality, I wish they uploaded 720p learning beauty.

Thank you bitsai! Great source. Google's Python Class is also good.

Their two day class, right? I'm a fan of that also; it quickly gets you to a level where you can do basic things and lookup slightly more complex things. http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ind...

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