Udacity (2)

Well, I have done the first unit and the homework and now I am working on the second unit. I have to admit that it is very fascinating how they lead you through the topics and explain them in a very entertaining way (although sometimes my head is buzzing :) ).

You always get some minutes of explanation via video and there are always some little quizzes just to make sure you understood the explanations. Although you got the answer right, I would recommend to watch the video with the answer nevertheless, because sometimes it has just one tiny little extra information that can be helpful later. If you still don’t get it: the forums are very good!

Let me give you a general idea how they approach the topic of building a web browser (because I didn’t get that at the beginning ^^):

A web browser gets as input a HTML or java Script file, has to read it and generate an image of what the code tells it to display:

HTML-File: “Write ‘Welcome’ in red!”

Web Browser: “Yes, Sir!” [writes ‘Welcome’ in red color = Welcome]

HTML-File: “Nice work!”

But in order for that to work the HTML-File and the Web-Browser have to speak the same language. So they teach you the tools on how you can analyse the symbols in a HTML-File in order to give them sone sense.

They also show you interesting logical concepts like “Finite State Machines” (resp. “Regular Expression”) that were new to me, but there are the perfect tool for analysing language. And the best thing is that I also get to know concepts that I can apply for Excel’s VBA (like dictionaries or the for-each-loop) my favourite programming language at the moment.

I hope that this kind of online teaching (especially in that quality) can be found more often in the future in the internet.

Keep up the good work! :)