I see that there's a udacity help thread already, but this is just to inform people about the awesomeness that is almost here. If this belongs (or is already stated) in another sticky somewhere, feel free to move.

CS 212 - Design of Computer Programs (instructor is some google director of research)

CS 253 - Web Application Engineering (instructor is guy who made reddit and hipmunk)

CS 262 - Programming Languages

In for CS212 and CS253.

in for same.

looks like cs212 for me

Ditto

I'm signed up for all 4 of the new classes. I almost certainly won't have time for all of them but so I'll see which ones are the most interesting.

yeah same

they say the pre-req is the equivalent of CS101, can i assume they'll be teaching the classes in python? i've been meaning to finish CS101, but had to catch up on javascript on codeacademy and didn't want to mix the 2 languages.

I wouldn't say there's a lot of python in udacity's cs101 (especially in the end, unit 5 is an introduction to hash tables, unit 6 is an introduction to recursion and an implementation of a link ranking procedure), but I'm almost certain I read/heard that all the programming courses are going to be in python for now.

For anyone doing the Web Application course who is using Windows were you able to successfully connect to the servers using telnet? I installed telnet and then tried to connect within the telnet window using:

o www.udacity.com 80

and I get a message saying "connecting to www.udacity.com..." which stays there forever.
If I try other port numbers (or no port number at all) I get error messages saying that I can't connnect.

Also I can't run telnet from the command prompt as windows won't recognise the telnet command. Is this something to do with my environmental variables?

I couldn't get telnet working on Windows either, so I installed cygwin with telnet. While installing, it asks you to select packages. Search for inetutils and toggle the "Skip" to a version number.

I ended up installing a different program as well (ncat) and I was able to connect with that.

Early review of 212 -

Good medium difficulty content. If you ever wondered how to write an elegant python poker hand ranking program, this is your unit. Introduces testing too. Second homework for ranking hands with jokers = pretty fun and not that easy.

Early review of 253:

Starts off too simple. Spends too much time on w3schools level html stuff. But the first homework is to get on GAE, which is good, the less time to spend in their web python environment the better. Still great hopes for this course.

Early review of 262:

Running low on time and only about 7-8 videos in, but this course has a lot of potential. Medium difficulty content from the get go; if you're weak with regular expressions, this unit should fill in a lot of gaps.

Yeah 212 looked interesting on first glance, probably going to watch the videos sometime

I signed up for these 3 but also for 101 as well since I hadn't done that before. I was hoping that since I have a solid grasp of C#/Java fundamentals that I'd be able to wing it. As it turned out I couldn't do any of the questions in 212 today as I just didn't have the Python knowledge. Gonna try and blitz through the units in 101 so that I can get up to speed with 212.

253 and 262 were real easy to get into though. The learning curve is very manageable. The guy doing 262 reminds me of Gale from Breaking Bad with all of his obscure literary references and general nerdy quirkiness.