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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!"
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.
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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.
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Maybe because it's apparently being offered by Stanford directly, not their spin-off, Coursera? (There's no way Slashdot could reasonably run an article for every new Coursera class; there's tons of them now.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I suspect most would benefit from an introductory course.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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