Online Course: Introduction to The .NET BackgroundWorker Component

Just completes this course. Not much learned that i did not know about background worker before starting the course, actually I find remarkable resemlance to the ways i used background worker when Jeremy is describing his way of using background worker in in MVVM, and it seems that the TPL way described in the course is not very safe for parallel processing (anyway that is not his focus which is more of async call of long process from ui views). However, I do like that his comparison in the implementation of TPL for async call similar to background worker. Also the course gives me some new thought on using background worker event properties such as .Result, .Error and .Cancelled.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/dotnet-backgroundworker-component-introduction

Online Course: Introduction to 2D Game Programming with XNA

This course is very similar to the MonoGame course I read, albeit providing a bit more on how to manipulate in the game such as sprite sheet and animation as well as a more feature game (instead of the simple pong game in MonoGame course), but since sprite sheet concept and other stuffs taught in the course, i have already used these features and logics in my own MonoGame app before being taught there, there is really no much to learn in this course for me.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/xna

Online Course: Cross Platform Game Development with MonoGame

Pick up this course because I need to quickly write a simple simulator of some animals doing crowd simulation using C# that will run in mobile, Unity 3D seems to be the option but its 2D features seems to have a steeper learning curve than MonoGame, therefore i picked the MonoGame (open source alternative to XNA that supports cross platform including mobiles). The course is quite simple, in fact the pong game used as demo in the course is next to nothing compared to the kind of games I built in the past, but it turns out to be quite a pleasure to learn MonoGame by watching the course.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/monogame

Online Course: Text Retrieval and Search Engines

Very nice to course to learn how to implement search engine. Thanks to the course, I was able to build a basic search engine in C# having features introduced in the course such as:

Ranking Functions:
  -- BM25, Pivoted Length Normalization for Vector Space Model (IDF, TF transformation, doc length normaliation)
  -- JM and Dirichlet Prior Smoothing for Language model based query likelihood
  -- PageRank and HITS from Link Analysis

Feedback Functions:
  -- Rochhio algorithm with implicit feedback for VSM
  -- KL divergence model for LM

Inverted Indexing and Map-reduce

Web-crawler:
  -- breadth-first search, parallel, focused search

Link: https://www.coursera.org/course/textretrieval