Lambda the Ultimate

UC Berkeley provides a webcast of the lectures for a number of their introductory college courses. Being immersed in SICP, I decided that it might be a good idea to listen to the lectures for CS 61A from Brian Harvey which uses SICP as the text. I don't know if going back to fundamentals will interest others here on LtU, but this is a good resource for a beginning CS computer course. Of course, being a series of some 40+ lectures during the course of a semester, it has both the advantages and disadvantages of learning the material through the academic setting (40+ hours is too long for casual learners).

A couple of tidbits. Although the course uses SICP as the text, it's used more as background material. The course has a certain Logo accent with the examples, with a preference for word and sentence problems rather than math problems - at least at the start of the course. It also jumps into subject matters like client-server and object-oriented programming that are a stretch of the text. Two of the lectures are occupied by videos from Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls. And the subjects of the lectures don't necessarily follow SICP in a sequential manner (the Scheme1 interpreter is interleaved with trees in chapter 2). That said, I liked seeing SICP presented from a different angle.

From a PL perspective, the most interesting piece is likely the lectures on Logo. One of the projects revolves around modifying the meta-circular evaluator to Logo. With Brian Harvey's knowledge of both Scheme (Simply Scheme) and Logo (Computer Science Logo Style), there is a lecture and a half (somewhere around the Meta-Circular subject) that goes into the parallels between Scheme and Logo. Also a discussion of the PL design decisions that went into Logo (dynamic scoping, namespace seperation,...).