Beginning Developers: Free Course from MIT

Posted by michael on Friday October 4, 2002 @06:04AM 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"?"

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Eh... by rixstep · 2002-10-04 07:52 · Score: 4, Interesting

- Required reading is a book on Java. To me, this is a helluva way to teach programming to beginners. They don't learn anything about the machines they're dealing with - and as a result, you're going to get more of the bloated and bugged output you have today.

I don't give a royal hoot about objects - not where beginners are concerned. How about register shifts, how about how an accumulator works, how about some frikkin assembler?

These people are being taught to fly and they can't even crawl. Major disaster.