EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Beginners => Topic started by: westfw on February 22, 2016, 01:36:38 am
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There are a lot of questions of the form "How do I learn X."
And these days there are a lot of online classes of various sorts that claim to teach "X", some for nominal or significant charges, many for free. These can be televised For-credit classes by major universities, Massive Online Open Classes (MOOCs) explicitly designed for online access, mere videotapes of classrooms, or even vendor-produced training.
I propose that this thread be used to post reviews of such classes...
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Algorithms, Part 1 and Part 2.
Offered by Kevin Wayne and Robert Sedgewick of Princeton https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI (https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI) https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partII (https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partII)
I was really impressed by this class; Sedgewick has a very clear lecturing style, and the class seems well designed for online use. It has been repeating "regularly."
here's the description from Coursera:
Part I focuses on elementary data structures, sorting, and searching. Topics include union-find, binary search, stacks, queues, bags, insertion sort, selection sort, shellsort, quicksort, 3-way quicksort, mergesort, heapsort, binary heaps, binary search trees, red-black trees, separate chaining and linear probing hash tables, Graham scan, and kd-trees.
Part II focuses on graph and string-processing algorithms. Topics include depth-first search, breadth-first search, topological sort, Kosaraju-Sharir, Kruskal, Prim, Dijkistra, Bellman-Ford, Ford-Fulkerson, LSD radix sort, MSD radix sort, 3-way radix quicksort, multiway tries, ternary search tries, Knuth-Morris-Pratt, Boyer-Moore, Rabin-Karp, regular expression matching, run-length coding, Huffman coding, LZW compression, and the Burrows-Wheeler transform.
I only watched lectures, without doing the assignments, and it helped fill in holes in my education (along with things that have been developed since I left college.) The assignments also looked more "interesting" than typical online classes, without being out-of the range of material taught in class.
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"How to use Git and GitHUB" https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-use-git-and-github--ud775 (https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-use-git-and-github--ud775)
By Caroline Buckey and Sarah Spikes of Udacity. (Free, on-demand, with exercises.)
This is a pretty good introduction to Version Control Software in general, and Git in particular. A topic frequently not mentioned much at typical universities (?) but important in industry.
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For those who want to step out from the Arduino IDE,
and understand how to program a MCU, I strongly recommend to follow the MOOC
from Austin University "Embedded Systems - Shape The World"
by Jonathan Valvano and Dr. Ramesh Yerraballi
https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-shape-world-utaustinx-ut-6-03x (https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-shape-world-utaustinx-ut-6-03x)
The target platform is the Ti Launchpad Tiva C which are very powerful
evaluation boards similar to the Arduino, but which you can get at low price from Ti or any main distributor.
The Austin team have done an extraordinary job with their course, as you will be able to directly program a board using a professional IDE (Keil) with step to step instructions and automatic correction and evaluation
with their special module.
You will have to buy the EK-TM4C123GXL board which is only 12.5$, and has a on board debugger.
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/trying-to-get-away-from-arduino/?action=dlattach;attach=185744)
The new release of the lectures has started January 20, 2016, but has no strict deadlines
and you can step in at any time until the end of the course in May 2016.
Even if after that you want to go back to Arduinos, you will have learned all the fundamentals.
You will learn how to use a debugger,
and will be able to easily adapt to any other MCU. You can also choose to continue on Ti MCU, which you can also
program through an Arduino like interface, Energia.
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https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/online-resources-for-self-education/ (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/online-resources-for-self-education/)
Or how about just use the sticky at the top of the forum? Would be a lot easier.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/electronics-primers-course-material-and-books/ (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/electronics-primers-course-material-and-books/)