Somehow this has made me realize the big lifestyle gap between me and everyone I know versus the people writing what I read around here.
Me and virtually everyone I know live that way, but instead of retired at 30 we are hustling and struggling at 30. Sure, hipsters on food coupons, you can laugh all you want, but no future all the same. Wish we could be on that path, but it's too late, we made the wrong decisions, we are forced to thrift like everyone else now.
The kids feelings reflect my own. After the high standards I got used to thanks to Khan, I expected more of the same and was sorely disappointed. Most of the stuff on Coursera is not better than reading a book unassisted. In most cases, it's worse. Udacity fares much better, they've taken tips from the Khan book and tried to fit the medium instead of pointlessly replicating the university experience online.
I didn't catch algorithms but am dipping my feet into automata, logic, compilers and machine learning right now. I'm going to have to drop compilers and machine learning because it's too much work for my schedule right now but I will still follow the lectures.
It's a mixed bag, I must say. The user experience of the website itself works a charm. The classes themselves, not so much. After being addicted to khan academy for a while and trying udacity, the dryness of the coursera classes feels like a big setback. I am watching the same slide for 2 minutes while a teacher throws a lot of technical lingo at me and the only way it feels like an improvement over a brick and mortar school is that I can rewind until I've figured out what he is trying to say. This is in opposition to other courses out there which do involve you strongly in ways that are more suited to the medium.
I have no complaints about the difficulty level - I do, however, with the deadline system, since a lot of people taking these classes (including me) don't have the flexibility to spend the necessary amount of time every week, and once you are one week behind unless the class is under your level it's hard to catch up.
Everybody here is complaining about the money thing but I'm just bothered that the "platform" seems to be paradoxically...not programmable enough.
I mean, there's been a lot of criticism about codeacademy's populist ambitions lately, and the core of them to me is that you can't bridge regular johny's knowledge to programming knowledge by just presenting them with an esoteric text adventure in a javascript command line. People can't be so easily compelled to play text adventures nowadays, especially if the game commands don't relate at all to their everyday language and experience.
I think in order to produce succesful learning experiences for noobs, which is what they seem to be aspiring to (I mean, maybe Mayor Bloomberg has a hacker soul, who knows), you have to give them a real inmediate need for it. Like - when Myspace forced everybody to learn to get under the hood to customize their profiles. Myspace created more programming literacy among non-coders than I think Codeacademy ever could if it remained like this!
They have to offer fundamentally different ways of giving lessons if they really want to get there, other than command line games. Someone out there mentioned ifttt.com being a better way to learn about programming basics and getting people interested in the possibilities. I can think of a few others.
As I said I have not looked too much into what their lesson framework looks like, but if they offer a choice between js, ruby and python...that's already too narrow. If """we""" want to educate the general population about programming, it has to be way broader than that, and the framework that supports such education has to be more programmable
http://regex.learncodethehardway.org/
thats a good one on regular expressions. He also has a good one about SQL - it's incomplete, but what is done is very sweet.
I'm also trying to go the same path as you. I know a bunch of java and python but when I look at the source code of just about anything I don't understand what anything is doing, and it's very frustrating, so I'm trying to build a very simple framework in python from scratch - but I've no idea how to go about it. I got a million texts but no idea how to connect them.