#1195 overall
18.783 Elliptic Curves
MIT OpenCourseWare
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2015 · score 0.7
MIT OpenCourseWare course 18.783 on elliptic curves, a graduate-level mathematics course offered as lecture notes, assignments, and recommended reading rather than video lectures. It covers the basic mathematics of elliptic curves as used in modern cryptography analysis.
One commenter took it after reading djb's detailed IETF mailing list posts, wanting to understand the underlying math, and praises the OCW style of free, no-signup material.
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I prefer the MIT OpenCourseware style, where there's no signing up, no trying to get money out of you and you can come in and just take what you want out of a course, much of it graduate level classes where knowledge is dumped for it's own sake, whereas Udacity/Edx/Coursera all seem geared to introductory courses and selling credentials. I typically just want the lecture notes, assignments, and the recommended reading now. I find video lectures too clunky to load up in the bulky UIs of MOOCs, bandwidth problems, and they eat up too much screen space for working along writing out the programs. I appreciate the condensed versions in the notes too since I don't have a lot of time to dedicate an hour to watch a lecture I could read much faster.
For example this course on Elliptic Curves http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-783-elliptic-curve... I decided to take after going through djb IETF working group mailing list posts which are so detailed I wanted to understand the basic math involved. Every post he writes is so thorough it's typically almost a class in itself in modern security analysis http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg07335.h...
Also, I originally learned "real development" (my decade of hacking around C willy nilly modifying programs doesn't really count) from Sussman's "Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming" where you read chapters out of SICP and then work on assignments, with mini lectures built into them in just plain text http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...