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Take a Free Networking Class From Stanford
New submitter philip.levis writes "Nick McKeown and I are offering a free, online class on computer networking. We're professors of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford and are also co-teaching Stanford's networking course this quarter. The free, online class will run about six weeks and is intended to be accessible to people who don't program: the prerequisites are an understanding of probability, bits and bytes, and how computers lay out memory. Given how important the Internet is, we think a more accessible course on the principles and practice of computer networks could be a very valuable educational resource. I'm sure many Slashdot readers will already know much of what we'll cover, but for those who don't, here's an opportunity to learn!"
Talking about packet formats is difficult if the student doesn't understand the idea of bits, bytes, and memory addresses. How memory is laid out isn't mean to imply segments, pages, virtual memory, caches, registers, or anything like that, just the idea that you have cells of bytes.
Looking forward, I agree with you -- it would not be hard to figure out how to present some background material on these topics to make the course more accessible. But this is just the first time we're teaching it. We'll learn and adjust the content appropriately. For this first time, though, we didn't want to venture too far from what we're used to teaching. It's enough of a change to move from live lectures to recorded videos and handle all of the structural differences in an online course.