2012/05/08

Udacity timings

So, the three Udacity courses that I'm doing at the moment:

1) CS101 - the introductory course, aka "How to Build a Search Engine"
2) CS212 - "Design of Computer Programs"
3) CS262 - "Programming Languages"

Are all currently on week 4 of 7. Which means Week 5 will start on the 14th; Week 6 will start on the 21st, and Week 7 will start on the 28th.
And whaddaya know, I'm getting married during Week 5, on honeymoon throughout Week 6, and getting back just in time to catch up on a week and a half of material and then do the assessments.

On the bright side, CS101 is fairly simple - as an introductory course - and because the course matter hasn't changed since it was last run I can access all of the lessons now. So I'm finished with CS101, and I'll just need to refresh my memory a bit before doing the assessment/exam/whatever.
CS212 is okay - the concepts aren't generally that complex, but some of the application does get pretty tricky, because it's trying to teach habits of thought and rules of thumb, more than specific methods. A sort of "do I really want a hammer for this job, or a spanner?" At least, that's my impression; equally, it assumes a fair bit of knowledge that you can get from other students on the forum, or from other websites etc in order to focus on what he really wants to get across. As such it's quite rewarding, but more of a time commitment than it might have been.
CS262, is cool. Like CS101 it takes a big, ambitious-sounding aim - in this case "Write your own web browser" - and yes, this means that by the time I am finished I will have written my own Google and my own Firefox XD - and gets you there through the course of seven weeks. There is some commonality of material with CS212, which is all to the good. For example, CS212 introduced Regular Expressions, then sort of assumed that you knew how they worked; which I did, because I'd been slightly more comprehensively introduced to them by CS262!

Well, at the end of the day I work best under pressure - so I guess it's all to the good that it's fallen out this way, because I'll have a crunch around when I finish the courses, and then get back to the original point of this - my app!