Courses

Notes and solutions from various courses

by Ty-Lucas Kelley

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Background

There are tons of great, free, and online courses out there. In fact, there are so many that I will never be able to enjoy taking all of them. That's what inspired me to create this repository of course notes and solutions; while simple notes will never be a full replacement for a course experience, they can at least be a substitute that take much less time to go through.

I write very detailed notes and solutions for every class I take. I'm sharing them here with the hopes that others will:

1. Benefit from them and share them with others.
2. Be inspired to share their own notes and solutions.
3. Offer feedback and criticism, so I can improve my note-taking.

Despite this being public and on GitHub, I will not accept any pull requests. This is meant to be a repository of my notes and solutions, not a community-driven effort like Victor Felder's Free Programming Books. I would encourage those who wish to contribute to create and share their own notes and solutions.

I will also mention that my notes are not always an exact representation of what was taught in the class. I sometimes remove what I feel is unnecessary and add what I feel is supplementary or helpful.

Enjoy!

Topics Covered

The focus will be on computer science, math, and engineering-related courses, but I have other interests as well, like music and history.

Below is a list of everything that I have planned / completed. There may be notes and solutions that are present in the repository but are still incomplete, so read this list to see what I feel is "production-ready".

Current Courses

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Udacity

• Intro to Computer Science
• Object-Oriented Programming with Python
• Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce
• JavaScript Basics
• Version Control

In progress

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Udacity

• Web Development
• Object-Oriented JavaScript
• Intro to Algorithms

Coming soon

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Udacity

• Intro to Data Science
• R Programming
• Differential Equations w/ Python
• MongoDB
• Website Performance Optimization

Coursera

• Databases
• Compilers

MIT OpenCourseWare

• Physics (Mechanics)
• Single Variable Calculus
• Microeconomics

edX

• Functional Programming with Haskell

Current Notes and Solutions

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Udacity

CS 101 - Introduction to Computer Science

• Summary: A great CS course for beginners and those with a bit of programming experience alike.
• Instructor: David Evans, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia
• Prerequisites: N/A
• Topics covered:
  • Basic Python programming (arithmetic, strings, lists, dictionaries, procedures, loops, etc.)
  • Problem solving / thinking like a computer scientist
  • Formal grammars / Backus-Naur form
  • Brief introduction to how computers and networks function
  • Recursion
  • A bit of algorithm analysis / cost
  • Hash tables
• Notable assignments:
  • Web crawler and search engine that ranks pages
  • Gaming social network

UD 036 - Object Oriented Programming with Python

• Summary: A short and nicely-paced introduction to OOP concepts.
• Instructor: Kunal Chalwa, Masters student at Stanford University's School of Education
• Prerequisites: N/A (some Python experience is helpful)
• Topics covered:
  • Quick refresher on basic programming concepts and Python syntax
  • Using Python modules
  • Using 3rd-party modules like Twilio via PyPi
  • Using and making classes
• Notable assignments:
  • Build a "Movie" class to create an online movies database
  • Come up with your own final project

UD 617 - Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce

• Summary: A high-level overview of how Hadoop works and an introduciton to writing MapReduce code.
• Instructors: Sarah Sprohnele and Ian Wrigley of Cloudera
• Prerequisites: Python programming experience
• Topics covered:
  • What "Big Data" is
  • History of Hadoop
  • Overview of Hadoop ecosystem
  • Writing basic MapReduce code
  • Common MapReduce design patterns
• Notable assignments:
  • Analyzing server logs
  • Finding commonly used words on the Udacity forums

UD 804 - JavaScript Basics

• Summary: A breif introduction to JavaScript in the context of DOM manipulation.
• Instructors: Cameron Pittman and James Willias of Udacity
• Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of HTML and CSS
• Topics covered:
  • Data types: strings, arrays, numbers
  • Variables
  • Objects & JSON
  • A little bit of jQuery
  • Conditions and if statements
  • Loops: while, for, for-in
  • Functions
• Notable assignments:
  • Building a résumé

UD 775 - Version Control

• Summary: A nice introduction to using Git and GitHub for your projects.
• Instructors: Caroline and Sarah of Udacity
• Prerequisites: Ability to read source code, basic command line knowledge
• Topics covered:
  • History of Git & why version control helps
  • Using Git at the command line
  • Git commands: diff, log, checkout
  • Cloning and creating repositories
  • Committing changes and reverting
  • Branching and merging
  • Merge conflicts and other problems
• Notable assignments:
  • N/A