Its been a real long
time and I know that this particular post should have come out long back, but
well, its better late than never ;)
I don’t always
promote or endorse studies but this is one thing that I really wanted to.
A friend of mine
told me that Stanford University offers courses that can be taken online
without any payment and there is so much that we can learn from them. I
immediately checked the website and it was true. Thank you Sudheesh.
Anyways, I took up a
course of networking but I really didn’t continue it seriously. Later, I left
that particular course. Then in my vacations, I found a course that required no
second thought - Introduction to Databases. The moment I knew that this course
was being offered, I knew that this is one course that I would enroll into and
also sincerely complete. Therefore, I took this course.
I know DBMS is not
exactly the subject to interest everyone and it is definitely one of the major
subjects of CS / IT branches, which requires a lot of efforts from our side. If
it matters, even I would tell you that, yes, this course will take some input
from your side but it is one course that will not bore you. You would enjoy it
thoroughly and complete it honestly.
The best thing about
the course is the teacher - Jennifer Widom, and she is just fabulous. Her way
to
I am not here to
provide any answers (sorry, if you were looking) but if you need any help, feel
free to leave a comment or drop in a mail… In this post, I sincerely recommend
this course to all the students and professionals in the CS / IT sector. I know
that this course is a little long (10 weeks) but this is useful worth of a
lifetime. You can always save the videos (like I have) for future use and
references.
The format of the
course is pretty simple. There is a weekly syllabus which needs to be read
before a specified deadline. Weekly tests and other assignments need to be
submitted before their deadlines in order to earn some marks. There is a
mid-term exam at the end of 5 weeks and a final exam, at the end of 10 weeks.
For all the tests, assignments and exams, you get more than one attempt but
only limited number of attempts… therefore, I advise you to seriously you to
seriously study the content before you attempt any of the papers.
So if database is
something you need to look at or you are looking for an online course - take my
word, this is one course you wouldn’t wanna miss.
To join the course - Current (2014) session
and if the course is over, you can look at the Stanford Online Courses, to find the schedule of the next session.
Enjoy learning!!
