Brian Kernighan's Advanced Programming Techniques Class at Princeton

Do you remember any? I'd love to hear some!

Please ask him what motivated the decision to use Comic Sans in the lecture notes. I'd have loved to read them otherwise.

Advanced for students, like "advanced algebra". Not for professionals. But great to teach this before kids start jobs.

It does look like an overview or a survey of various topics, not sure how in depth on each topic. Would love to see videos of it.

Any of those topics could be taught at an arbitrarily advanced level. You could, for example, demand that each one be studied and a non-backwards-compatible alternative be designed with the wisdom of hindsight and, of course, implemented in C.

If I were considering that class for a grade, I would hope that those topics would be mostly introduced rather than dealt with in that kind of depth. (Now, if it were a non-graded, non-time-limited, free Udacity or Coursera online course that I could work my through as time allowed, I would rather have the depth. Just don't make me master one new decades-old technological toolbox per week and grade me on it.)

Comic Sans is the font of choice for CS class lecture slides.

I saw the font and closed my browser.

I wasn't a CS major while there, but I did take a few CS classes. Those classes, in particular, are top notch, and a lot of time was clearly spent on at least the intro classes (the first 3-4 classes you may take). The classes are very well polished, the support staff is welcoming and teaches well, assignments are always really fascinating, and the courses as a whole are very put together. It's part of the reason that the CS department size more than doubled in the last few years!

I'm currently at Berkeley EECS. It's certainly a very good program, and they put a ton of effort into undergraduate education. For example, I was recently talking to people at the ParLab about how they developed a rather popular class about parallel programming, so undergraduate education is certainly something of a priority.

Ultimately, it really depends on what you're interested in. From my perspective, Berkeley seems very good for systems stuff: parallelism, distributed systems, databases or even computer architecture. The undergraduate CS classes are all rather good and mostly interesting. (Except for the stupid Java/OOP/data structures course--that was a big waste of time, but you can probably just skip it.)

However, the classes really aren't the most important thing. I think there are two things that trump this. One is simply location: Berkeley is very close to a ton of startups. I've met some incredibly smart people running exceptional companies, and even worked at a couple during the year. It's a great resource that would be hard to duplicate anywhere outside of the Bay Area. Even if you don't plan to spend much time working at startups, it's still really cool to occasionally pop down to SF and hang out with hackers; the community around here is really great.

The other aspect that's more important than classes is research. Berkeley has a very project-driven approach to research where people decide on applications first and tailor their research to that. Some projects are really full-stack: for example, at the ParLab (where I'm doing some undergraduate research), there was a demo where everything including the hardware, the OS and the high-level algorithm design all stemmed from active ParLab research, all integrated together at the very end. If you like that sort of thing, it's very neat. The other big lab I know about--the Amp lab--operates similarly.

It's also going to depend on what particular subjects you like. From my perspective, Berkeley is great for all sorts of systems stuff: architecture, distributed systems, parallelism and so on. It's really a great atmosphere for that sort of work, with a ton of cool people to talk to.

Of course, this does mean that most of the stuff that's going on is annoyingly practical. Relatively few people seem to be working on neat theory, and most of that is in complexity. So if you want to study cool theory just because it's pretty, Berkeley might not be ideal.

I've found myself inexorably drawn to PL theory--types, categories, algebras and so on--and Berkeley is really no place for that :(. It's driving me to distraction. So if you're interested in something along those lines, I'm willing to bet that Princeton is quite a bit better. And I really do think PL theory is the coolest field, partly because of how general it--it's applicable literally everywhere in CS and then spills over into math or even physics--but mostly because of how pretty it is.

Also, if you like functional programming--another thing I'm very interested in, unsurprisingly--then Berkeley is also the wrong place. Most people seem to know literally nothing about it beyond its being somehow related to functions and a bit wonky, and I've only met a few people who know much beyond that.

Anyhow, I hope that helps you get a good idea of how Berkeley is like. I'm very biased, but I think my biases cancel out: on the one hand, I go here and it's great; on the other, the things I actually like are sorely under-represented and that really annoys me.

No lecture videos as of yet, but perhaps eventually. Princeton began a partnership with Coursera last year and the CS department has been relatively active, e.g., our algorithms course is now on the site [1], and I believe that they actually 'flipped' the course over the past semesters, i.e., students were expected to watch the lectures online and typical lecture hours were replaced with professors fielding questions / working through examples.

[1] - https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI

I'm a princeton alum --- unfortunately, this isn't mandatory, but it's pretty popular!

that it isnt compiled ?

Dynamicly typed and interpreted, it is one of the many uses of the term 'scripting language' [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout%27s_dichotomy