Does anyone have experience with the Stanford Classes:
Intro to CS: Programming Abstractions OR
Intro to CS: Paradigms

I'm wondering if either (but particularly Programming Abstractions) is a nice follow up to the "Intro to CS" class @ MIT (6.00). Stanford's class is for students coming from a Java background. Any idea if coming from a Python background will be difficult? Thanks. Does anyone have experience with the Stanford Classes:
Intro to CS: Programming Abstractions OR
Intro to CS: Paradigms

I'm wondering if either (but particularly Programming Abstractions) is a nice follow up to the "Intro to CS" class @ MIT (6.00). Stanford's class is for students coming from a Java background. Any idea if coming from a Python background will be difficult? Thanks. @Computer Science

Question

Does anyone have experience with the Stanford Classes:
Intro to CS: Programming Abstractions OR
Intro to CS: Paradigms

I'm wondering if either (but particularly Programming Abstractions) is a nice follow up to the "Intro to CS" class @ MIT (6.00).  Stanford's class is for students coming from a Java background.  Any idea if coming from a Python background will be difficult?  Thanks. Does anyone have experience with the Stanford Classes:
Intro to CS: Programming Abstractions OR
Intro to CS: Paradigms

I'm wondering if either (but particularly Programming Abstractions) is a nice follow up to the "Intro to CS" class @ MIT (6.00).  Stanford's class is for students coming from a Java background.  Any idea if coming from a Python background will be difficult?  Thanks. @Computer Science

anonymous · Answer

About the course itself, I can't tell about them, but I watched Mr. Susskind's course in Quantum Dynamics, and it was really interesting, Stanford has top notch classes and I found the technical stuff also pleasantly surprising - good camera footage, good access to syllabus, stuff like that. That being said, I don't think you would struggle too much in learning Java if you grasped the concepts of OOP from MIT 6.00, like polymorphism, classes, objects, and the like. Another option, that might not count as a rigorous course, but that I found the lectures fascinating was UNSW's Higher Computing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE7l6Adoiiw&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL6B940F08B9773B9F Might or might not please you, but I would advise you to give it a shot and listen to one lecture :-)

rsmith6559 · Answer

I've done MIT's 6.00, Stanford's Programming Methodology and I'm almost done with Programming Abstractions.  CS106B is a C++ course with little focus on the language.  If you have experience with C based languages, you'll probably be OK.  The course focuses more on algorithms and is heavy on recursion.  CS107 is primarily C, with an overview of Python and Scheme.

IMO, Programming Methodology is a better starter course than MIT 6.000.