Udacity Course on Building a Search Engine | Hacker News Reader

Udacity Course on Building a Search Engine

udacity.com

34 pointsmjfern7 comments

I just finished this course. I started learning programming in January.

It struck a very good balance between being accessible to beginners yet still teaching substantive knowledge. Beginners can learn quite a bit; if they put in the effort to keep up and make sure they truly understand the concepts.

The format was excellent. Lessons were broken down into short 3-5 minute videos. Quizzes were frequent and confirmed understanding of the concepts.

I personally hate learning with videos. Fortunately, they included detailed course notes with each lesson, so I could read through those quickly when I needed to review.

Finally, each unit came with homework questions, which were graded. Some were quite easy, but others really made you think (there were some forum complaints about this).

As a programming newbie, I learned a lot in seven weeks. I'm looking forward to their new higher level courses.

Having a CS 101 entry point for beginners is really important, and Udacity did a good job with theirs.

My girlfriend took the course that started in february and her progress is absolutely fantastic.

I really recommend all non-programmers to take it if they want to get a grasp on how cs people think.

That's a very ambitious goal for an introductory CS course. Still, I wonder if building a search engine is a motivating goal for new programmers these days. I'm sure it's been tried many times before, but a class that introduced programming and game development at the same time would, I imagine, be more exciting to potential programmers.

I'm biased, but I believe it's a fascinating topic. Many people would love to know the "magic" behind Google. When I studied Electrical Engineering (late 80s) the two most interesting topics to me were TV and microprocessors. Both concepts had been around for a while, but I still wanted to know everything I could about how they worked.

Stanford CS276, "Intro to Information Retrieval," also covers most of the stuff you need to know. In spite of the cruftier name. The textbook is freely available:

http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/

I didn't know about this. What's the model? does it require registration and attendance? why isn't the material openly available?

Sorry if I'm asking something stupid. I'm not a newbie but I like teaching and I'd like to know more about their materials and approach.

Udacity is fantastic. It's the best online CS education I've ever seen.

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