[Simown]

Udacity is a startup company founded by David Stavens, Mike Sokolsky, and Sebastian Thrun that takes initiatives like MIT's OpenCourseWare to the next level. Over the next seven weeks students anywhere in the world will have the chances to take part in the first two classes being offered by Udacity: CS101: Building a Search Engine and CS373: Programming a Robotic Car.

CS373 assumes that students have prior knowledge of programming while CS101 is designed for absolute beginners. Both courses will use the Python programming language. If you've never used Python then this is a great chance to try it out as the introductory class will start from the most basic level.

Never before has there been a way to not only watch video lectures, but also complete assignments and follow along in discussions with what is expected to be 160,000 students or more.

To find out more visit the Udacity website. Registration for these courses will close on February 28th, but classes start February 20th.

[Faitas]

Thanks for it Simon. I registered now and I am waiting for it.

I registred in CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE. Interesting, what will be programming language? Maybe Python or not?

This post has been edited by Faitas: 20 February 2012 - 01:01 PM

[Simown]

Python will be used for both courses, from the site FAQs:

Quote

Python will be used in both CS101 and CS373. If you are taking CS101, don't worry if you don't know what a programming language is yet. If you are taking CS373, you should either already know Python, or have enough experience with another language to be confident you can pick up what you need on your own.

The clue's in the topic title too

This post has been edited by Simown: 20 February 2012 - 01:15 PM

[m_wylie85]

this is probably a stupid question but i take it these classes are not live stream e.g. i can watch them at any time after the 28th

never mind i read the FAQ's

This post has been edited by m_wylie85: 20 February 2012 - 05:16 PM

[Simown]

On the FAQ again:

Quote

The lectures are posted each week for you to view at your convenience.

So no, you can watch them after they have been shown - definitely. It doesn't specify if you can download the lectures for offline use, on their site. We'll soon find out!

This post has been edited by Simown: 20 February 2012 - 05:20 PM

[Brewer]

Simown, on 20 February 2012 - 08:50 PM, said:

On the FAQ again:

Quote

The lectures are posted each week for you to view at your convenience.

So no, you can watch them after they have been shown - definitely. It doesn't specify if you can download the lectures for offline use, on their site. We'll soon find out!

It's likely that the videos will actually be hosted on Youtube, so you can probably use a 3rd party program to download. Maybe Youtube has an option for downloading a video? I'm not sure.

[Simown]

Ah, yes, very possibly. I just remembered there introduction videos were hosted on YouTube. I am not sure YouTube allows direct downloads, but as you say, 3rd party tools are widely available to do that.

[Brewer]

It is also worth noting that there has been a discussion on Google+ where someone has supposedly taking on the task of setting up a mirror site for people in countries that, for whatever reason, can't access Udacity.com. More info on this should be available in the days to follow.

[curryjl]

This is awesome! I am super excited.

[Brewer]

EDIT: The site is now up! Good luck soldiers.

This post has been edited by Brewer: 20 February 2012 - 08:44 PM

[CityGirlLuv]

That's pretty awesome. I just enrolled in the learn how to build a search engine class so I'm pretty excited about this especially since Python is on my list of things to learn.

[Skaggles]

I signed up for the CS101 class and some of the students have started some IRC channels for people to continue discussions on freenode ##udacity-cs101. I've been looking for an excuse to learn Python and this seemed like that perfect opportunity.

This post has been edited by Skaggles: 22 February 2012 - 12:27 AM

[SwiftStriker00]

Probably gonna enroll in both, just to check it out.

[griffinsdesigns]

The building a search engine class sounds interested. Is it free?

[omarav]

griffinsdesigns, on 22 February 2012 - 07:28 PM, said:

The building a search engine class sounds interested. Is it free?

Yes, it is free. I just enrolled in it.

Python has been on my list of things to learn for quite some time now, so I just enrolled in CS101. It sounds pretty exciting to me.