Update: These notes are very old now, from back in 2012/2013. The course still exists at Stanford, but I would suggest visiting there to get the latest information.

Today I viewed lecture 1 of the Stanford CS106A course on iTunes U. No programming was done on this introductory lecture but instead, a lot of details about the course, about what will be learned as well as a number of items relating to the students at Stanford who actually take the course.

Although I have made a lot of notes, I wont be going in to detail on some of the points as parts of the lecture relate to students at Standford only.

Prerequisites of CS106A – ie… what do you need to know?

For those who haven never programmed before, you’ll be glad to learn that there are no prerequisites at all for this course, other than the lecturer hinting that it would be good to know how to switch a computer on.  As no experience is needed, that means that most people should be able to work through this course although I’d expect that those wanting to take the course will have a reason for wanting to take it and therefore, might have some background.

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Updated 2 April 2025

Over the past 13 years I have worked with and still am learning programming. I began with iTunes U with the CS193p course from Stanford University, as well as others listed below.

In my Hello World post written back in December 2012, I wrote that I wanted to learn how to create apps for the iPhone. As well as the mentioned CS193p course, which is still updated, the latest being 2023, and still taught by Paul Hegarty, who does an amazing job. Just prior to going through that course I went through CS106A, CS106B, CS107. I am happy to say that I have been creating iPhone apps over the years, although I have also worked with other languages such as PHP, C#, .NET, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript to name a few. What I enjoy the most is iPhone app development.

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Update 2025: It has been a good number of years since I wrote this article, originally written December 2012. Since then I worked more with Objective-C, then moved to Swift and then SwiftUI. In between all of that I began studying remotely at BYU Idaho learning software engineering. I also worked with PHP, JS, TS, Python, C# and .NET, and now back to PHP and SwiftUI.

Original Post

Over the past 11 months I have been learning how to program. I started off with Java and went on to C++ and then to Objective-C. This site exists for me to document what I learned in the lectures as well as some tips and sample code to help you find answers to programming questions/techniques that you are struggling with.

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