Stanford Introduction to Databases Course, Winter 2013 edition, starts today | Hacker News Reader

Stanford Introduction to Databases Course, Winter 2013 edition, starts today

class2go.stanford.edu

60 pointsingve11 comments

I took this course a year ago, and really enjoyed it. I never took a data base course at university, but I've been using some SQL over the years. Getting the theoretical grounding was quite useful, and also seeing all the ways queries can be composed. And, professor Widom has a good sense of humor.

I still can't get over that all these courses (Coursera, Udacity, EdX etc) are available for free. Just amazing!

I've written about my impression of the course in more detail here: http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-...

Thanks for the write-up, I'm enrolled and have been looking forward to it, now even more so after reading your description

I took this a while ago. The quality is exceptional and the explications very good and intuitive. Can't recommend it enough for people who want to learn about databases.

Thank you - I'm just starting this course, and your write-up has given me a much better idea of what to expect.

I took this course in Fall 2011. I learned quite a bit about many facets of SQL. At the time, it didn't offer much in terms of NoSQL, except to explain what NoSQL systems don't offer.

I've been a web developer for 7 years, and although I write SQL every day, I never took a DB course during my CS degree.

This course taught me about the database features which had always been mysterious, such as transactions, triggers, and relations. It also gave me some formal knowledge, which was the hardest part of the course.

Their online exercise system was fun to use and the tests were reasonable.

For me this is the best of the online courses. Jennifer Widom has a fantastic teaching style, and the conversational presentations are far more effective that recorded lectures. The exercises were good an challenging. I took the original course, and the one area I gave feedback that needed improvement were the forums. The new forums run by Piazza seem to be a big step forward.

It was so good that I will take a refresher and try to find time to do more exercises.

Course topics look lucrative, but the introductory survey is only accessible from desktop, not from tablet or mobile. Strange to see this happening, taking into account the huge population of folks at Stanford who are capable to write on the Internet.

Is this identical to the coursera class? This link was working just a few days ago, and today I couldn't find it. http://www.coursera.org/course/db

Yes, it looks the same (I actually still see it on Coursera, but the link takes you to this site).

I'm not sure if maybe they decided for the second time offering the class to do it themselves (I am now "enrolled" at about a half-dozen different online course websites, it's actually a little bit of a pain to manage them all).

Thanks for sharing. I just enrolled!

Would be nice if this was available on iTunes-U.. guessing it won't be?

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