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Beginning Developers: Free Course from MIT

Posted by michael on from the crispy-brain dept.

arrogance writes "Yes, this has been posted on /., and on Wired (five days after the /. story). But there are occasional postings on slashdot about Where to Start Learning to Program. There's a software engineering course at the MIT site that looks like it covers many of the basics of software development, from OO to testing to documentation. It also deals with a team based project end-to-end, which is a great way to learn, but it might be tough finding two or three like minded people to take the course with. Has anyone tried these courses? Are they any good? Have any slashdotters (is that a word?) taken the course "live"?"

1 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. I Had Daniel Jackson by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    After working on a small government radar tracking project, I had a grad-level class with Prof. Daniel Jackson on Software Design. Unfortunately, I'm not academically brilliant, because it usually took me an hour of stewing on a knot in my stomach before I figured out why it was there. So, I always ended up questioning decisions after they had been made. With MIT's liberal drop policy, I dropped the course nearly at the end, but here was my general experience.

    1) We were "improving" a NASA app that was having scalability problems

    2) No one had even benchmarked the application to see what the bottleneck was. I didn't even know how to bring the app up.

    3) The course was primarily for his graduate researchers so that they could get credit for their work and he was expecting near-full-time work from everyone. They obviously were spending a lot of time on it and discussing it outside of class, thus the others in the class were pretty well out of the loop.

    4) I got the feeling that there was no real engineering going on. It was purely mathematical and analytical (i.e. let's do this in my new modeling language). (At least there wasn't any going on during classtime).

    So, when the course was over, I had the general feeling that my 2.5 years of full-time experience being on a 12 man team creating an object-oriented radar tracking app from the ground up (including having a nearly identical performance problem!) didn't amount to a hill of beans because I couldn't express it in the right "terms" and didn't have an IQ of 250.

    I'm not saying I was perfect in this. Just that you don't ignore someone with that much domain expertise.