Udacity - Intro to Computer Science - Build a Search Engine & a Social Network

In this introduction to computer programming course, you’ll learn and practice key computer science concepts by building your own versions of popular web applications. You’ll learn Python, a powerful, easy-to-learn, and widely used programming language, and you’ll explore computer science basics, as you build your own search engine and social network. You’ll learn the programming language Python, and you’ll explore foundational concepts in computer science. Most importantly, you’ll start thinking like a software engineer by solving interesting problems (how to build a web crawler or a social network) using computer programming. This course is a first step into the world of computer science, and whether you want to become a software engineer, or collaborate with software engineers, this course is for you. You’ll be prepared for intermediate-level computer science classes when you’ve mastered the concepts covered in this course.

Build a Search Engine

Throughout this course, you’ll build a search engine by learning about and producing key search engine components including a crawler, an index and a page rank algorithm. As you build these pieces, you’ll be learning about and practicing computer science skills that will ready you for intermediate level computer science courses.

Build a Social Network

At the end of the course we will give you a set of relationships (i.e. strings of phrases like “Dave likes Andy, Kathleen and Kristy”) and you will use your new computer science skills to organize these relationships into a social network. With your new social network, you can explore relationships and gain insight into how you fit into your own social networks.

Syllabus:

Lesson 1: How to Get Started

Interview with Sergey Brin
Getting Started with Python
Processors
Grace Hopper
Variables
Strings and Numbers
Indexing Strings
String Theory

Lesson 2: How to Repeat

Introducing Procedures
Sum Procedure with a Return Statement
Equality Comparisons
If Statements
Or Function
Biggest Procedure
While Loops
Print Numbers
Lesson 2.5: How to Solve Problems

What are the Inputs
Algorithm Pseudocode
Optimizing

Lesson 3: How to Manage Data

Nested Lists
A List of Strings
Aliasing
List Operations
List Addition and Length
How Computers Store Data
For Loops
Popping Elements
Crawl Web

Lesson 4: Responding to Queries

Data Structures
Lookup
Building the Web Index
Latency
Bandwidth
Buckets of Bits
Protocols

Lesson 5: How Programs Run

Measuring Speed
Spin Loop
Index Size vs. Time
Making Lookup Faster
Hash Function
Testing Hash Functions
Implementing Hash Tables
Dictionaries
Modifying the Search Engine

Lesson 6: How to Have Infinite Power

Infinite Power
Counter
Recursive Definitions
Recursive Procedures
Palindromes
Recursive v. Iterative
Divide and Be Conquered
Ranking Web Pages

Lesson 7: Past, Present, and the Future of Computing

Past of Computing
Computer History Museum
First Hard Drive
Search Before Computers
Present of Computing
Slac and Big Data
Open Source
Future of Computing
Text Analysis
Energy Aware Computing
Computer Security
Quantum Computing