[aiansiti]

Took his course in college. Could not down vote this post more. I have much PTSD from his lectures because Boaz was figuring out how to teach mid-lecture. If you read the textbook you'll find many typos and a plethora of mathematical notation that lacks any intuitive explanation. On the upside, I guess I know what a Turing machine is now...?

[tofupup]

Just for balance, Boaz is in my top 5 CS professors. For more advanced theory topics you need more of a guide as the field is pretty wide and deep; he is great at that. I am not sure how to reconcile my learning experience with yours but I have fond memories of Boaz's lectures.

[portal_narlish]

I just took CS121 recently and echo this. Theoretical CS is really a broad topic to cover in a semester. The early sections on computability theory, CFGs, regex are really good. Once it gets into complexity classes things kind of stop making sense.

Doesn't help that the textbook is still a buggy WIP, and there are no written solutions to problems in the book or the homeworks.

[over500pieces]

I took CS121 last semester, and it was my favorite course I've taken so far, and I thought the textbook was excellent (this is not a popular opinion).

Everyone is in agreement that the course improved significantly since the first year he taught it (Fall 2017). Fall 2017 it was ROUGH, but I have absolutely zero complaints about his teaching last semester.

[aswanson]

He seems like he means well, though. Posting all of his notes free of charge.

[portal_narlish]

He also encourages students to make a pull requests when they find errata.

I can see the argument that this "open sources" the literature and brings students closer to it.

However - students are not experts in the subject matter and this makes for anxiety-inducing and frankly ineffective pedagogy. You are there to learn, but never know if the proof you are reading is correct or not. The errors get in the way.

[kbp]

It's not a wiki; he's free to not merge changes people offer him.

[pooya13]

Do you know of an alternative resource over this one?

[wk_end]

Sipser [1] is the standard and deservedly so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_the_Theory_of_...

[ashton314]

Used this book in my CS course. Loved it. I felt like it was clear and well written.

[everybodyknows]

MIT online catalog:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

[52-6F-62]

It's great they release all of this for free. I mean, it will never be the same as having that piece of paper from MIT— but at least one can rely on the resources as being quality.

[gumby]

I'm glad to see you write this. When MIT launched OCW (thanks to Hal Abelson, of SCIP fame) I was shocked by the number of articles amazed that MIT would give away their "Crown Jewels". MIT's position was precisely yours.

[mesaframe]

There is one course from CMU not exactly same but is along the lines

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm3J0oaFux3aafQm568blS9...

[bjourne]

Kleinberg and Tardos book: http://www.cs.sjtu.edu.cn/~jiangli/teaching/CS222/files/mate... But that book is not an easy read either and will be hard to digest for someone not comfortable with reading mathematical proofs. It comes with the territory.

[weaklearner]

This is not a TCS textbook. This is core algorithms.

Source-TA ing an algorithms course with tardos

[bjourne]

Perhaps you only covered the first part of the book? Chapter 8 and beyond are definitely about theory.

[weaklearner]

That's true. Good point. Also I really like this book. It's just not really what I think of when I think of theory.

[zerr]

There was a course on Udacity.