To get started in this course, send an email message to Greg Wilson to say 'hi'; he'll send you back these three chapters from the book Making Software:

1. Mark Guzdial: "Why Is It So Hard to Learn to Program?"
2. Michele A. Whitecraft and Wendy M. Williams: "Why Aren't More Women in Computer Science?"
3. Andrew Begel and Beth Simon: "Novice Professionals: Recent Graduates in a First Software Engineering Job"

Please also have a look at this post on the Software Carpentry blog, which compares Greg's attempt to teach online with these research-based best practices. For your first task, write a blog post of your own that compares what you do (or what's been done to you :-) with those best practices, then add a comment below with a link to your blog post.

Thanks,

Greg

Links (extracted from people's comments)

• Gregory Brown
• Julie Pichon
• Jaelle
• MrSteve (and further thoughts)
• Duane Griffin
• Laura B
• Terri
• Leopoldo Teixeira
• Ethan White
• Neil Chue Hong