Stanford Programming Methodology (CS106A)

The Programming Methodology course is a part of Stanford University's Stanford Engineering Everywhere. Through this program, students and educators can access many of Stanford's courses online, free of charge. I was essentially able to audit this introductory, semester-long, computer science course for free. I watched the lectures, did the reading assignments and the programming assignments. I found it very interesting and learned a lot. You can find the course at https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS106A. Here's some basic information about it.

Professor

The course was taught by Mehran Sahami. You can read his profile here. You can tell that Mehran enjoys teaching the course. I found his enthusiasm for the subject to be very engaging. He uses a lot of helpful illustrations for what could be complicated topics and even throws in some fun pop culture references that I could appreciate. Through his video lectures, I got a sense of what it would have been like had I pursued computer science in college.

Textbook

The course textbook is The Art and Science of Java by Eric Roberts. It is available for purchase and a free PDF version of an early draft is also available online. Just search for it and you should find it. I found the book to be informative and easy enough to follow. I even put up a quote from the book in my cube at work, his definition of software engineering - “the discipline of writing programs so that they can be understood and maintained by others”.

What's Covered

As one would expect from the course name, it provides an introduction to good programming methodology and uses Java as the language of choice to do this. It covers, among other things, Variables and Types; Expressions, Statements and Control Structures, Methods, Randomness and Events, Objects, Strings, Classes, Arrays and ArrayLists, HashMaps, Interactors, Collections, Debugging Strategies and Searching and Sorting.

Assignments included three games, Breakout, Hangman and Yahtzee; a data graphing program and a simple social networking program. I enjoyed working on these programs.Naturally it would be better to actually take the course and get feedback on your code but because so many people have taken the course, it's easy to find other people writing about the assignments online. I also created a Stack Overflow account and was able to get some help and feedback that way.

I do recommend the course to anyone looking for an introduction to programming in general and to Java in particular. I will get into some of the specific things I learned through this course in future posts.

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