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Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

People without a formal algorithms background should strongly consider taking Algorithms from Roughgarden. I took that class from him, and it's a great class that he teaches spectacularly. Great for the self-taught hackers whose coding skills lag their formal knowledge of some of these quite-useful techniques.

I'm probably taking Networking and Machine Learning for credit. I'm excited that McKeown is teaching networking for the first time since I've been around (not sure if he ever did). He's done some really interesting networking research and usually teaches the more advanced networking class, which I've heard great things about.

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I've been taking the other algorithms class (Sedgewick and Wayne from Princeton), which has been interesting and informative so far.

I'll second your statement about the usefulness of these classes for people who are self-taught - I'd been trying to go back to school to get a CS degree, but working full-time and not being very close to any universities made it difficult. While I won't get an actual degree from these online courses, they have been really useful so far for filling in some gaps in my knowledge.

My algorithms professor is using the videos from the Sedgewick and Wayne course entirely as a way to present new material in place of lectures. He's teaching their book and his view is essentially that his time in lectures is better spent answering questions and interacting with the class than introducing new material that has been extemely well presented on the web already.

I can attest to the quality of Sedgewick and Wayne's lectures, and I have a lot of respect for my professor's humble and novel approach to teaching this course.

You are damn lucky. It's a rare professor who focuses on the needs of the student at the expense of his own ego inflation.

It's not Stanford, but UIS offers an online degree: http://csc.uis.edu/

UIS is associated with UIUC, so I can't imagine the coursework is of poor quality.

McKeown used to teach CS244 before it was watered down into a lit review course (and before CS144 existed). The premise was basically that you will have built the entire internet by the end of the quarter. I took CS244 in early 2008 and it was probably my favorite class at Stanford.

Oh wow, I didn't know what it used to be. I heard a couple people who liked it last year (McKeown was one of 3 teaching it). It sounded like it wasn't all lit review (unlike 240, which had literally nothing but paper discussion). They had several projects using OpenFlow to explore various topics, the last of which was open ended. But sounds pretty different than what they're describing.

See http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs244/2012/index.html

Thanks for the tip. Where is Roughgarden's part 1 for algos?

Ah, it was linked to on the part 2 course page: https://www.coursera.org/course/algo

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