I am watching those lectures as well. I ordered the previous edition of the textbook to follow along with. One thing that really irked me was that the quality of the audio in some of the lectures was spotty. I had to turn the audio up all the way in my headphones and then it seemed to only come in on one side. I know it is a minor detail but when I think about the high quality feeds dedicated to celebrity gossip it gets a little bit depressing.
I clicked into some of the other courses and was disappointed to see that video lectures weren't available for all the courses. We really need to get to a point where all the math, comp sci, etc is available in high quality format. Another thing we need is redundancy. I think G. Strang is an excellent lecturer but we need variety for different learning styles. Still I am impressed with what MIT is doing and hope to see more of this in the future.
Yes, the book is great as well, it's written in a very friendly tone.
These lectures were recorded long ago (1999), recent lectures (on calculus and another course) by Strang have higher video quality.
I have experienced mono audio on some too, you might be able to fix it with your video player though. ( If you are watching on iPhone/iPad, there is a mono setting in settings-accessibility btw.)
yea I caught that point about too much calculus. I studied math as an undergrad - 3 semesters of calc, 2 real analysis, 2 more of topology and have not used any of it as a programer. I did linear algebra and discrete math but it was not enough to really make a difference. It seems like history is more at play here than anything else. For 300+ years they have been polishing up that continuous math track and it was what all the scientists and engineers found useful.
I also think this is the reason everybody uses doubles and floats for doing financial apps. It makes so much more sense to use integers and talk about "how many" pennies one has rather than "how much" money one has. Floats and doubles were designed to estimate continuous quantities not exact figures.
I clicked into some of the other courses and was disappointed to see that video lectures weren't available for all the courses. We really need to get to a point where all the math, comp sci, etc is available in high quality format. Another thing we need is redundancy. I think G. Strang is an excellent lecturer but we need variety for different learning styles. Still I am impressed with what MIT is doing and hope to see more of this in the future.