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Comment by pixelmonkey | Hacker News Reader

Was glad to see this posted here, especially since in late August, I'll be taking the one-week SICP course that David Beazley in the Python community put together:

https://www.dabeaz.com/sicp.html

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Given there's so much free material on SICP out there, paying $2500 to learn SICP feels a bit like paying a personal trainer to force yourself to work out (which I've admittedly done before)

It indeed feels exactly like that, yes. And, obviously, you've never taken a Beazley course before. :-)

>"And, obviously, you've never taken a Beazley course before. "

Could you elaborate on this point? I am not familiar with this individual or their classes. Is there something special?

You can see some of David Beazley's presentations on YouTube. He presents regularly at PyCon and other conferences. He's also the author of Python Essential Reference and the editor of Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition.

One of my favorite presentations of his that gives a flavor of his instruction style is "Python Concurrency from the Ground Up" at PyCon 2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4

I saw this one live, but I think the recording is good quality. He live codes a Python 3 highly concurrent, generator-based TCP server that does fibonacci calculations, if I recall correctly.

One of the YouTube comments gets it right, it's "The Jimi Hendrix of Python".

The prior course I took with him was called "Writing a Compiler (in Python)". I think I took it the first time it was offered, in 2012. In that course, we implemented a programming language that was a (very small) subset of GoLang, by building the entire parser/compiler in Python. So, in 5 days, you learned all about compiler theory, and wrote your own compiler (in Python) for this GoLang-style language. The last day, we peeled away the layers of the onion for how PyPy is implemented under the hood, using our newfound compiler toolchain knowledge. It was really fun. He has a very engaging presentation style and a fascination with computing that is infectious. You leave the course energized and happy to be a programmer.

   "So, in 5 days, you learned all about compiler theory, ..."

You did not. Not to detract from the course - I have no opinion on that and you seem to have got a lot out of it and sounds like fun. But in 5 days no instructor or course is going to give you anything more than a fairly superficial understanding of something like compiler theory.

It sounds a lot like a typical module from one of the more rigorous introductory undergraduate courses on compilers, that's good stuff!

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I would love to hear feedback on how the SICP course is. It looks like his classes are in person only which is unfortunate for those not in the US I guess.

Thanks for sharing this video. I had no idea who he was.

Also, David Beazley's work on SWIG is also outstanding! He deeply groks the C++ type system as well a plethora of other languages, and made a great tool that ties them all together.

http://www.swig.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIG

>The Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator (SWIG) is an open-source software tool used to connect computer programs or libraries written in C or C++ with scripting languages such as Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl, and other languages like C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Modula-3, OCaml, Octave, Scilab and Scheme. Output can also be in the form of XML or Lisp S-expressions.

Original author(s): David M. Beazley

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