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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!"
I would agree with you if it were a 12 or 16 week course - but there is a lot to talk about in terms of the physical and data link layers and plain IPv4 before even addressing IPv6. Six weeks is barely enough time to provide a solid foundation there.
Probability should be taught early on at school, not waiting for university!
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
That's a pretty bad example. The Monty Hall problem is often disputed even among the very well educated, and for a time that even included Paul Erdos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem).
Being baffled by the Monty Hall problem would not seem to be a reliable indicator of poor probability education. It just shows that the Monty Hall problem, for most people, isn't intuitive *despite* being educated.
I know that this is going to be an unpopular statement, and I'm sure to be moderated into oblivion for saying this, but Slashdot doesn't need a bunch of advertisements for a free micky-mouse level class from a University that is pandering for some free publicity. Those of us with experience that have been in this business long enough know what it means when someone says, "Stop. Just stop."
If you want to look at advertisements in disguise for micky-mouse schools, and cheap DIY-hacks, there are sites and social networks for that, but it is unwelcome here, and we aren't prepared to lurk back into the corners of the Internet on IRC.
This is a place where a lot of professionals reside, and we are better than being lured into junk, overpriced four-year under graduate programs that leave the participants both unemployed and in-debt. It is the duty of the users of this site to mark this garbage move as what it is, a sham.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I disagree. If you don't learn much of the layer 2 concepts, then you'll probably never learn anything about layer 2 troubleshooting. One time I had to work on a network where they had separate discontiguous VLANs that couldn't talk to one another. I remember a while back hearing about a major hospital whose network failed because their engineers didn't understand some of the more advanced layer 2 concepts. There are also issues such as implementing measures preventing some idiot from creating switching loops that STP can't detect, e.g. cascading some $10 switches they found at wal-mart which are creating a layer 2 broadcast storm that is bringing down an entire VLAN.
Troubleshooting isn't the only thing, you also won't understand layer 2 security, which has been exploited quite a bit lately. Some easy examples would be MAC flooding and MAC spoofing, to the more severe problems like VLAN hopping, and much more that I can't think of off of the top of my head.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK