Udacity Review: Free and Awesome

Posted By Matt on Jan 7, 2013 | 0 comments

I have wanted to be able to program for a long, long time, but it is expensive and time consuming. Learning with written tutorials, like Python for Dummies is really hard, I’ve found. Udacity, however, has made it much easier.

There is an end goal.

I’m not a big fan of “hello world” tutorials. I like how Udacity says “In 7 weeks, you’ll be able to scrape the web and program a basic search engine. I’m on week three so far, and I can see how it is rounding into shape. I’m motivated to finish. It is fun.

It expects me to know nothing and explains it well.

Everything is explained from square one, with nothing left out, and not too much added. You move fast but you have everything you need. The creators of Udacity are Google dudes, and they utilize video + whiteboard + the internet to make awesome quizzes as you go through. (the ‘whiteboard’ screen turns into your test, and you click it!) Whenever you write a program, you can submit it, and their servers will check your program for expected outputs a couple seconds later. If you get it right, yay, if not, it tells you. And you keep trying. Also, you log in, and it keeps track of exactly how far you’ve progressed.

It costs free ninety nine. (that’s FREE.)

Yep, just go to their site, sign up, and pick your course. You can take physics, stats, computer science, entrepreneurship, and many more.