Courses

Notes and solutions from various online 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. 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!

Folder structure

Everything is organized like this:

/topicA
    /providerA
        /courseA
        /courseB
/topicB
    /providerA
        /courseA
    /providerB
        /courseB

An example would be topic (Computer Science) -> provider (Udacity) -> course (CS 101)

Topics covered

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

Below is a list of every course that is either done, in progress, or being taken soon.

Current courses

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Computer Science

• Udacity
  • CS 101: Intro to Computer Science

Software Development

• Udacity
  • UD 036: OOP with Python
  • UD 617: Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce
  • UD 775: Version Control
  • UD 804: JavaScript Basics

In progress

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Computer Science

• Udacity
  • CS 215: Intro to Algorithms

Software Development

• Udacity
  • CS 253: Web Development
  • UD 015: OOP with JavaScript

Coming soon

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Computer Science

• Udacity
  • Advanced Operating Systems
  • Intro to Data Science
  • Intro to Theoretical Computer Science
  • AI for Robotics
  • Intro to Machine Learning
• Coursera
  • Intro to Recommender Systems
  • Compilers
  • Cryptography I
  • Cryptography II
  • Programming Languages
• Stanford
  • Statistical Learning

Notes and solutions

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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 introduction 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 brief introduction to JavaScript in the context of DOM manipulation.
• Instructors: Cameron Pittman and James Williams 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 resume

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