Beef up your programming skills - Take a Stanford course - free

After a number of years in the field we all think of ourselfs as "seasoned developers". A lot of us (like me) came from other professions into IT. I studied economics during national service (where I had to learn COBOL), went to law school and hold a certification as counsellor. I also went through IBM training in their internship program in the 1980ties (COBOL again, but also hardware, mainframe, midrange, PC and 1-2-3). Despite all experience it makes a lot of sense to connect back to the roots. After all computer science is a university subject. Tim Tripcony thinks so too. He notifies us that Stanford Engineering Everywhere offers a free course in Programming Methodology. You now can get Stanford Quality education from the comfort of your home, hotel room, plane seat. The download of lectures and materials is a whooping 20GB (I downloaded the MP4 version) in 28 lessons taught by Mehran Sahami. You start by downloading the course material and then the videos for the individual lectures. Being a good net-citizen you use Bittorrent for that. Ubuntu comes pre-loaded with Transmission as Bittorrent client -or- for any platform you can use Vuze/Azureus (a Eclipse RCP application) or make your pick from a long list.