Resources to Learn More

Reading Recommendations

I don't necessarily recommend that you buy the books from Amazon; I just want you to be able to read summaries and reviews. You may be able to get them through the library (either W&L's or your local library).

* Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment George Leonard

Essays, Articles, Blogs

History

Fiction

What many computer scientists have read…

Additional Resources

Viewing or Listening Recommendations

Fun Alternatives for the Intro Student

  • GeomLab – “introduce you to some of the most important ideas in computer programming in an interactive, visual way through a guided activity.” Starts out slow but moves quickly
  • Alice - “Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing.”
  • Scratch - “Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art – and share your creations on the web.”
  • Turtle Java - “graphics programming environment designed to provide an enjoyable introduction to programming in Java syntax, together with fundamental concepts of computer science such as compilation and machine code.”

Online Courses

From Alicia Bargar

  • Udacity: A catalog of free online courses created by a Stanford professor interested in making excellent computer science education available to the masses. Each course is 7 weeks and consists of a combination of videos introducing a topic and coding practices to try it out. Also includes homework and an optional exam. Course topics range from general programming to web applications to algorithms, and change each semester. AI topics are particularly strong. Physics, discrete mathematics, and statistics topics recently introduced. Very highly recommended.
  • Coursera: Universities' answer to Udacity. Provides wide range of courses in topics in computer science: theory, programming, AI, robotics, systems, and security, as well as a range of other subjects such as electrical engineering, scientific computing, biological sciences, etc. Participating universities include Stanford, Princeton, Georgia Tech, and University of Michigan. Courses tend to be about 6-7 weeks long but vary. Teaches with combination of videos, quizzes, and assignments. Highly recommended.
  • Python Challenge: “The first programming riddle on the net.” In a similar format to the traditional web-based riddle sites: solve a riddle using clues on the given page to proceed to the next page). However, these riddles are designed to be solved using Python programs, and are excellent practice for applying topics like real expressions and pickling.
  • Code School: A collection of mini courses. Covers mostly topics related to web development: focuses on design, web tools, and programming language courses for Ruby and Javascript. I believe courses are developed independently, so quality varies. Good for those who want an introduction to one of the topics listed. NOTE: not all courses are free. To access all, have to pay fee of $25/month.
  • Code Academy: A collection of mini tasks that take you through the basics of Javascript, HTML, CSS, JQuery, and most recently Python. May be too simple for the advanced programmer, but good for learning basic syntax of the included languages and an introduction to web development. Free.
students/reading_recommendations.txt · Last modified: 2020/02/11 17:09 by admin
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