Advice on Independent studies

[CalmLogic]

Just found a new textbook on algorithms that is free to download:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html (draft copy)

The book is by Dasgupta, et. al. and has received excellent reviews at Amazon.com. The book has less than 340 pages, so it is less detailed than the huge Cormen book on Algorithms. This may mostly be a good thing, however, since the huge Cormen book makes it easy to lose focus on what is important. I would still recommend getting the Cormen book as a reference, especially since it is the most popular book on algorithms. (Unfortunately, both books do not provide an answer key to their exercises.)

[CalmLogic]

Regarding MIT OpenCourseWare, the link below has some great tutorial problems with solutions for computer architecture:

6.004 (Computation Structures - MIT)

There are also lecture videos at the link above, but they may not be as good as the videos from Berkeley that I posted in this thread.

BTW, to keep all of one's study information organized, I like Microsoft's OneNote, which has a free, fully-functional trial that lasts for at least 60 days. OneNote lets one keep study notes, lecture notes (including PowerPoint files), ETS booklets (PDFs), links, etc. all in one place for easy browsing, searching, and highlighting. OneNote also has a screen capture utility, the keyboard shortcut for which is "Windows Key" + "S".