I’m usually pretty happy with my mad geek skills, but most of what I know about programming is self-taught. Someone thought it would be a good idea to put me in front of a teletype terminal in 1976, and I’ve been hooked since then. But back when I was actually learning stuff for a living, I majored in American Civilization and Communications instead of playing with computers.

Unfortunately, there are lots of gaps that come from this kind of educational process, so I sat down and took Harvard’s Intro to Computer Science over iTunes U last week—and I have to say, whoa. This is an amazing class. David Malan is both an excellent teacher and an interesting presence on stage, and goes through the concepts with skill and humor. I ended up learning a lot about C, and while I was able to whiz through most of the web-based technologies at 2x speed, I picked up quite a bit of useful information there as well.

Also, the demonstration of a Huffman tree is possibly the most beautiful intellectual theory I’ve seen in a very long time.

Malan’s class is currently the #2 class in iTunes U, so fire up iTunes and find it there (in the iTunes store under the iTunes U tab; the class is a free download), or use Harvard’s own web presence at cs50.tv. The class is geared for an audience with no programming experience; starting with C will throw you into the deep end, but that’s part of why I’m so impressed with Malan and the materials that Harvard has published to help you through it.