| If you enjoy watching videos, I'd recommend starting with the CS101 Udacity course (Intro to Computer Science: Building a Search Engine), which you can find here: http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs101/CourseRev/apr20... This courses will introduce you to the Python programming language and will also explain you how search engines work. It's a perfect course for a beginner, because it assumes no prior programming knowledge. It's also very interactive, because you often have to answer questions or to implement your own procedures in Python (you can write you code, run it to see the output and submit it for validation directly in your web browser). Looking at the syllabus, you can get a very good idea of what exactly you will learn throughout the course: Unit 1: How to Get Started
(Your first program: Extracting a link) Unit 2: How to Repeat
(Finding all of the links on a page) Unit 3: How to Manage Data (Crawling the web) Unit 4: How to Solve Problems (Responding to search queries) Unit 5: How Programs Run (Making things fast) Unit 6: How to Have Infinite Power (Ranking search results) Unit 7: Where to Go from Here (Exam testing your knowledge) I took this class a few months ago and I found it extremely interesting! Especially Unit 5, where you will learn how to implement hash tables (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table). |