[akhilcacharya]

> many graduates of other schools get explicit training in things that the MIT faculty, fairly or not, assumes students will simply pick up. And this is despite the heavy emphasis on actually doing stuff,

uh...I graduated from a low tier state school that was notable in our state for focusing on practical matters....and we didn't get 'explicitly trained' on this either. Most people do just pick it up.

[hinzed1127]

I got a CS minor from a top-5 program, and while a lot of the core classes definitely covered some of these topics in various degrees, it's really nice to see all of these aggregated in a concise way.

While you definitely do pick stuff up over time, this is arranged in a way that I could see myself preferring to reference this rather than find that one stack overflow answer that clicked with me at the time. Now that I at least have a better understanding of these concepts 3.5 years into real-world web development, this seems like a good resource to cover my bases better now.

[gumby]

Well, I appears from my experience a surprising number of MIT students don’t, making this mini-course popular.

As an MIT grad myself I should be biased to think otherwise, and I certainly hope the credential stands for something good. But I haven’t found much difference in programmers 5 years out of school — it’s been attitude that has mattered more.