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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!"
Seriously Slashdot, stop. Just stop.
Just a quick glance at the syllabus, and I didn't see anything about IPv6, if IPv6 gets deployed in the next 4 years, wouldn't that make the intro course essentially obsolete before anyone finished a degree? Remember, this is the year of IPv6 on the desktop.
Learn to love Alaska
I love the concept, but there is a problem: your prerequisites will exclude the overwhelming majority of non-programmers, and might even exclude a few novice programmers. Probability and how memory is laid out in a computer are the biggest issues here; even many computer science programs do not cover these topics until the second or third year.
Palm trees and 8
...and knowledge of how computers lay out data in memory.
Windows or Linux?
Non-programmers... on Slashdot? Did the demographics of the user base here change when I wasn't looking?
I'm LostCluster but I lost my password to that user. Hey Slashdot, how about helping me get it back!
I would love to take your networking class but I can't get many stupid network to work! If I knew how to do that, I wouldn't need the BLOODY CLASS!
Is this a for credit class that can be transferred to another school?
I suspect most would benefit from an introductory course.
As usually said on woot "In for one".
Should prove interesting. I've been a network engineer since 94 and I'm quite honestly disgusted by people who claim to be network engineers these days who don't understand the difference between Bit/Byte, the concept of a Packet or what CSMA/CD is. Administrators I'd expect that from, they don't really need to know these things. Engineers should, IMO. These are the basic building blocks of "traditional ethernet" networks, how can I expect someone to actually design something properly if they don't understand the basics?
Honestly I'm signing up for the course just to see how it's handled. If they decide to offer this in the future I can think of a few "Power Users" in my sphere of influence that might benefit from this, even if it's just the basic basics. I'm not expecting high detail of the low level stuff, but if it can actually help people understand what a packet is and how it traverses the internet at large then it's going to be a BIG step forward for some people and be of benefit to anyone who wants to hold any position in IT in general....
Okay... so how is this any different from the dozens of courses "from" Stanford on Corsera?
This is quite interesting since Corsera is a Stanford project... I wonder what the politics were that made them go this route instead?
You didn't have to do this. With Stanford's name behind you, you might even have made a fair chunk of cash selling it. But you didn't.
Thank you.
Seriously Coward, stop. Just stop.
Will this course teach enough to be useful for those who want to go into networking on a professional basis? For instance, will it enable them to pass the first of the Cisco network certifications? Will it confer enough skill and knowledge to do anything practical? Give credit or fill a prerequisite in a program that will go that far? Or is it just a feel-good class?
In my experience with Universities, "FOO for non FOO majors" and other survey classes have impressed me as snow jobs, shoveling out a lot of material in a disconnected and difficult to absorb way. They seemed directed more at giving non FOO majors an increased level of respect for specialists who have mastered the subject than to confer any useful skill or knowledge. I'm hoping this isn't another of the form.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's really great they're starting to do this. Hopefully in the future we can all go to Stanford.
Who gives shit.
Just take it and under education put "Stanford". It'll be one more thing to help get through today's hiring rigmarole. And in today's hiring environment, having anything - anything positive - that gets you noticed is a help.
shows how 4 year degree are not for IT / desktop / sever / network work.
and why IT needs to be tech / trades like with out being tied to a college time table. And having teachers who are not in school for life.
that is the college line of thinking loads of theory that for most people is not needed or is off base too top level.
Also all that knowledge is too much one size fit's all where networking can be it's own class track with people needing different levels of it based on what they are working with.
The task of a university is to help your understanding of principles, not to use the technology of a particular company.
If you want a Cisco certificate, take a class from Cisco.
Stop creating kewl online courses that I just have to take faster than I have time to actually take them!
I really dislike that argument. The truth is that to really tech you useful skills I have to show you how to do it using somebody's thing. To a large extent it doesn't matter who's stuff I use but I can't really just talk about it abstractly and expect you to be able to actually do anything when you're done. An analogous situation in computer science is that you should be taught ONLY general concepts and no particular programming language...ever...that would be up to you to figure out by yourself. The truth is that you probably need to be shown how to do it in at least one language by someone and then you can translate the concepts to other languages. The same is true for the networking area. If I explain the concepts and then show you how to do it on Cisco equipment you can probably figure out how to do it on just about any equipment. This is also why we don't just explain literary concepts abstractly, almost all literature teachers will use particular books as examples of the concept. Most people learn much better if there is an example...whether it's networking or literature. If that's not you great, but you're in the minority.
Thanks very much guys. Just signed up. I'll probably know a lot of the basics already but hopefully I'll learn a lot of the more technical details.
I applaud your efforts to teach this class, and I just enrolled.
The task of a university is to help your understanding of principles, not to use the technology of a particular company.
If you want a Cisco certificate, take a class from Cisco.
Yes, I agree with this. I don't like the idea of a university stumping for a vendor. Personally, I'm against these vendor-specific certifications and in my experience these vendor training programs do not necessarily produce better network admins/engineers. For the most part it is a money making scheme. I've seen some really shitty network admins and engineers that brag about their CCNA and CCNP. Learning how to do things Cisco's way does not in of itself, make a better network engineer. You have to know the theory first. Plus, there is real competition out there in the form of Huawei and Vyatta and others. You would do better to learn the UNIX networking tools and then just apply that knowledge to the vendor specific stuff.
Because if this is just another pheonix university, I might as well just read the Wiki and stamp my own "3 credits in compooter netwoorking" card.
A Cisco certification is useful for someone who needs to pick up practical skills immediately and become useful in a job right away. This Stanford course, however, is probably more useful for someone who's been in the industry for sometime and wants to understand networking on a deeper level.
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
I don't think that's what this would be aimed at. Most of your time as a network engineer will be focused mainly on layers 2 and 3, with a bit of 4 and even less as you go up to 7. From reading the description page, it looks like they are going into layers 6 and 7 rather extensively, (namely talking about HTTP and bittorrent) though I couldn't say for certain without actually going through the course.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Actually I've taken the Cisco courses (which are cheap by the way if you take them at a community college like I did - I've spent less for three years worth of classes than the typical university student will spend on one semester) and they cover a lot of theory.
And contrary to the opinion of some, the Cisco courses aren't very vendor specific. Yes they target Cisco's IOS and some of their proprietary protocols (e.g. EIGRP) they are remarkably vendor agnostic. From knowing only what I learned from Cisco courses, I was able to start working on Brocade and HP networking equipment with no trouble at all, as they make their CLI remarkably similar to Cisco's, and from what I've heard, Huawei does as well. Also it may (or may not) interest you and the rest of slashdot to know that Cisco's NX-OS (for their datacenter equipment) runs on the Linux kernel.
I've had a lot of experience using Linux before taking the Cisco courses, but after learning the Cisco courses, now I actually understand very well how the networking side of Linux works (I remember before, looking at the manual for ifconfig made no sense to me whatsoever, and I just followed "here's how to configure your IP address" guides on the net.)
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Well when I went to school probability didn't even exist. :)
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
From knowing only what I learned from Cisco courses, I was able to start working on Brocade and HP networking equipment with no trouble at all, as they make their CLI remarkably similar to Cisco's, and from what I've heard, Huawei does as well.
Redback/Ericsson, as well, uses a virtually identical CLI except where it must change to support Redback specific features. This was done deliberately, to make it easy for people trained on Cisco gear and/or interfacing with it or porting configurations from it. It's like making the steering wheel turn the same way as Ford's. B-)
Huawei may be a special case: I have heard claims that their equipment, at least initially, was a straight clone of Cisco hardware and software. (Things like identical, obscure, automatically-generated error messages, for starters.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I can see non-programmers like me fulfilling the first few of them, but something tells me the probability he's referring to isn't what we used back in high school or college math, and I have no idea where we would have learned the layout of memory outside of a programming class. When I took a college C programming class (which I barely passed & didn't learn from), the instructor said that handling RAM was taught in the "advanced" C class, as we needed to master the basics first; I similarly didn't see any mention of it when I looked into college Linux/UNIX and shell scripting classes several months ago.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
That is typical of what you get when computer science people teach networking classes. It is certainly not the case that all computer scientists and programmers look down on infrastructure people and concepts...but a lot of them do...you'll find that the case on Slashdot as well. People who program don't see the level of training in theory and practice that is important for network engineers and (good) system administrators. They just don't see low level protocols as interesting. Of course, my experience is that these people are often responsible for some horrible networks lacking redundancy, full of inefficiency, etc. The ability to set up a really good enterprise class network is not something that is simple or intuitive, it is programming and design in it's own right. I respect your ability to write software but I find it tedious myself but you don't see me looking down on you...
I don't think I would want to learn Huawei anyways, from what I gather (both on slashdot and elsewhere) they are notoriously insecure and lack competent troubleshooting and debugging features.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
It's the experience of interacting with people inside & outside the classroom that can keep up with your thoughts/knowledge, respond with ideas that challenge & invigorate you, and that share the drive to excel rather than just going through the motions. It's about finding friends and partners that understand from experience why you did things very few regular teenagers do (like spending most of your free time honing a talent as a teenager rather than goofing off), and that can tackle major projects in the future as equals even if their strengths are very different from yours. I'm a Berkeley alumna rather than from Stanford, but the basic premise is the same for any highly competitive school.
Also, attending a university was originally intended to help people learn to view their society & the world from a variety of angles before the ones they grew up with become too entrenched to look beyond, because that ability makes them much better citizens that are far harder for the government to manipulate and are better-equipped to solve their society's problems.
When adults whose college education spanned a variety of subjects look back on those years from that perspective, they often see that various beliefs shifted quite a bit between graduating from high school and from college, and sometimes can see which experiences changed them. Somebody that belongs at a school like Stanford is far less likely to get that kind of experience out of a regular college -- and nobody will get it by just watching lectures online.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
I really hope you're being facetious, but if not, look here: Wikipedia: Stanford University
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
...the prerequisites are an understanding of probability,...
What the hell? No wonder the internet slows down for no apparent reason:
User: What are the chances of my packet getting through today?
Network admin: Eh, about 83% today. Maybe your odds will improve tomorrow.
As opposed to your line of thinking that produces mindless IT monkeys who don't know how anything works, only know how to push buttons and get baffled every time something slightly unexpected happens?
what about trades based with real on the job trading or at a MAX of 2 years in a pure class room.
4 years in college comes with loads fluff and filler and big skills gap. There needs to be a middle of the road from the mindless IT monkeys to the people with loads of knowledge with a big skills gap.
Why is teaching IPv4 necessary at all? Particularly for a free course? Teach IPv6 independent of it, and in a separate paid course, teach things like transitional technologies b/w IPv4 and IPv6.
What these f**king morans things they are Khan (www.khanacademy.org) or what?
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
Very likely NO on the Cisco certification. I was a lot into networking during university and ultimately did a lowly CCNA on the side and I can guarantee you that no training but a Cisco-specific, if not CCNA-specific training will get you through even those entry level certifications.
While the networking theory alone should be enough, the cisco, router and IOS specific questions will break your back if you haven't prepared well for them. e.g. expect to be asked situational, specific IOS commands in multiple choice questions.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
I really hope you're being facetious, but if not, look here: Wikipedia: Stanford University
This is /. where half the posters think they are geek, but wouldn't even recognize a prestigious high-tech university located that is, in many ways, the intellectual beating heart of Silicon Valley.
So don't even try to educate. It's like trying to teach calculus to a donkey or cactus.
from what I gather ... [Huawei boxes] are notoriously insecure and lack competent troubleshooting and debugging features.
And then there are the analysts who believe they may contain Chinese governmental spyware.
Given that the IP theft that allegedly went into them was allegedly performed for them by the Chinese military and diplomatic intelligence network, that would be an expected reciprocal back-scratch. (Not to mention how handy it would be for domestic surveillance back home in China.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I signed up for this; I'm an old-time programmer whose formal education has not included much about the internet. I just wanted to point out that the fourth word in the terms of service, 'participate', is misspelled.