A Practical Computer Science Primer (2008)

That seems like a fairly complete syllabus, quite like what I spent 4 years learning in school (2 undergrad, 2 post-grad), minus the internships and actual work (and the mobile and web apps that we didn't have back in the day...). I wonder if these courses really took place and how they turned out.

Some minor topics missing are things like compression, multi-threading and locking, etc, but I suppose those are oversights, or there's just not enough time.

I think one glaring omission is the UI/UX. It's the last topic under "graphics," and I really wonder if they'll reach those last topics. I think usability, windowing, design, typography (as seen today on HN), and new interfaces (touch screen, Kinect, etc.) could be a topics for an entire lesson of its own. If only because I expect people who take such a course to be more practically oriented (as in teach myself to program so I can develop my app idea).

Also, given such an audience, I think an extra lesson covering real-world examples would be very helpful. The lesson on web apps and mobile probably covers a lot of the end-user cases, but I'm thinking about industrial applications, modern airplanes, big installations such as banking or stock exchanges, a mainframe that's still running somewhere, drawing-board to release of a Pixar movie, a data center or just a colocation facility (field trip!). And it might make sense to put this lesson as an intro, where even if the students don't understand the details at first, the rest of the course can be mapped to real-world examples.

But I do wonder about the OP's final intent of compressing years of learning into weeks of lessons. I'm not sure people can retain and make good use of so much information without putting it into practice. I would love such a course for some other topic (civil engineering, political science, etc.) but it would be more about expanding my general knowledge, much like I read wikipedia for fun, than about being able to do something with it.

OP here, some 5+ years after having authored that content and taught the class. Astonishing that this got surfaced - I was very surprised to receive a flurry of inbound requests to join a class I ran half a decade ago. I'd love to know how best to package the material - what would folks like to know? And how would folks like to learn it? Where are existing systems like Khan Academy and Codecademy falling short?

Neal Stephenson novels required reading eh?

That's one heavy duty course! Looks like it covers almost all of my 4 years of undergrad.

I wish there was something like this near me, I'd do it in a heartbeat