Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Alternative to MIT course

At UC Berkeley there is an alternative to the MIT course "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". The webcast page can be found here. The video is only streaming (Real Media), but the audio can be downloaded as a (MP3) podcast through iTunes.

There is a UCB Scheme, called STk, which has versions for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

In Mac OS X (which I happen to use), you'll need to run from a X11 terminal window, which needs to be pre-installed. For versions of Mac OS X before 10.4 (Tiger), you need to download XDarwin, if you haven't done so already. For OS X 10.4 and higher, there is a X system—X11 and Xorg—on the install disk, which should be used instead of the download from XDarwin.org. If you have X11 available in your /Applications/ folder, you already have X installed.

NB: While the podcast is convenient, it is not very useful to understand the lessons. You really need to watch the video stream, and perhaps use the podcast as a preview, to get a quick overview of the lecture before paying attention to details.

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