[Udacity] CS212: Design of Computer Programs (2012)

Online course for udacity.com, read by Peter Norvig (currently - Director of research at Google, also known as a guru in the field of artificial intelligence and programming in Lisp) . In this course, he regards the topic of software development, it is literally on the fingers of talking about such topics as the formulation of the problem, managing complexity, testing, search, probabilistic algorithms, building shell, and much more. slogan of the course include a quote from the forum Norvig: "The whole Course - a trip to Nebraska, not knowing what it is or where it is. "

The author shows how to solve unfamiliar, atypical problem with no ready-made recipes, but with a common methodology. story is told with the use of Python and suggests a preliminary acquaintance with him (or the skills to work with any other programming language, but then it will be harder to learn). Status Lisp gurus also imposed a stamp on the program: they are written in a functional style. This course is positioned as the author of "advanced", which is particularly affected the exam objectives. Council to view: In the questions section of the (unit) and homework (homework), and answer (solution) to them in the original box for the course is online and send a self-test solutions (in one section can be up to more than 20 of these problems were small), so before you watch the video with the answer, try to answer / finish the program itself, otherwise the whole the meaning of this course is lost. English description of the course and lesson plan:

Class Summary
Learn new concepts, patterns, and methods that will expand your programming abilities, helping move you from a novice to an expert programmer.

What do I need to know?
This course assumes previous programming experience, comparable to what is covered by the Udacity CS101 course.

What will I learn?
Move along the path towards becoming an expert programmer! In this class you will practice going from a problem description to a solution, using a series of assignments.

Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google Inc. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. Norvig is co-author of the popular textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Prior to joining Google he was the head of the Computation Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center.

Syllabus
Unit 1: Winning Poker Hands
Steps of the design process; Developing for clarity and generality; Arguments for program correctness; Experimentation and simulation.; Design tradeoffs; Simplicity and Clarity. Decomposition and composability.

Unit 2: Back of the Envelope
Back of envelope calculations; When to use brute force and when to be clever; The Zebra puzzle; Generator expressions; Permutations and combinations. Cryptarithmetic; Recursive and wishful thinking.

Unit 3: Regular Expressions, other languages and interpreters
Defining the language of regular expressions; Interpreting the language; Defining the set of strings matched by a regular expression; Other languages.

Unit 4: Dealing with complexity through search
Search: finding your way with a flashlight or boat; pouring water. Analyzing the efficiency of an algorithm; Recurrence relations; Matching data types with algorithms; Longest palindrome substring algorithm.

Unit 5: Dealing with uncertainty through probability
Probability: the game of Pig; Maximizing expected utility to optimize strategy.

Unit 6: Word Games
Managing complexity; Large sets of words; Appropriate data structures; Word games.

Unit 7: Conclusion
Final exam/project