JuliaAcademy is now free

We have exciting news: Julia Academy is now entirely free! Perhaps even better, we’ve simultaneously open-sourced the raw materials we used to generate the courses.

Julia Academy bundles interactive notebooks with instructor videos so you can follow along at your own pace. We now have five courses spanning from a basic introduction to machine learning and advanced parallel computing. We hope that making these courses and their materials free to use and share will help you all continue learning (or teaching!) the language.

Happy learning!

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This is truly fantastic. Thanks!

There seems to be an issue with the JuliaAcademyData repo. There is a build error due to a missing CredentialsHandler package .

Yes, that happens if you’re not using JuliaPro — I’ll try to make it a bit more robust in that case.

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Greatly appreciated.

@mbauman Dear Matt, I was checking your Flux introduction course, and I noticed that the sound is low in volume, and there is slight background noise. If you like I can help you fix the sound. I am also an audio engineer besides being a programmer :smile:

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This courses are really useful and inspiring : thank you very much for providing them !

Unfortunately the sound quality is really problematic : the distributed parallel part is sometimes impossible to follow (e.g. at around 20’).

Argh, thanks for the reports. We’ll work to make it better!

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The content is really good. I have gone through the parallel-programming course: it is tops! I look forward to listening to the others.

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Just interested, to what extent can the quality of audio be improved?

I’ve tried a couple of times to remove background amplifier noise from speech in Audition, but it always led to some distortions in speech.

Another time I tried to recover audio written with recorder sensivity set to minimum. It had dynamic range of just one bit, so high amplitudes were modulated by 1-bit impulse trains - but could not demodulate that to a comfortable level of understanding.

The audio of the Flux course was very clean and because it is just speech, I would say perfectly! But I haven’t listened to the other ones.
It isn’t just noise cause the source was quite good, but the main thing was that the audio was low in volume, which I can fix it by compressing and limiting.

As long as we have good headroom and the audio isn’t clipping, we can do a lot with it :grin:

Could you give a bit more details about the plans for Julia Academy? Will Julia Computing add other courses in the future which are not free, which will then be made free after some time? Or will all future content be free? If all future content will be free, have you considered moving it out of JC and under the JuliaLang umbrella?

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So I fixed the parallel computing sound to a some degree. The background noise is also fixed.
Other than the first lecture, all the others were low passed very aggressively at 5 KHz, so I added some artificial information above 5KHz. It adds clarity to the speech. I will send the new videos to @mbauman, so he uploads them

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I just tried to create an account but the sign up button is broken for me. My suspicion is javascript that failed to load. I am in China so some CDN providers for javascript are blocked. Google being the prime example.

Not sure if you could fix the issue. Nevertheless wanted to report it as I would love to try out the courseware.

What is in the JuliaAcademyData? Can’t data be just downloaded manually?

I’m complaining because I tried installing both JuliaPro and regular Julia and caused severe problems such that I’m removing everything and reinstall just Julia.

Today, I noticed the videos are not uploaded yet. I sent them to @mbauman about one month ago.

If someone needs them, I can give my personal Google Drive links.

You can download it directly. Clone this repository and load the data yourself (it helps you learn the general case of loading when there is no package to load the data)

https://github.com/JuliaComputing/JuliaAcademyData.jl

There are problems with getting data using the package. I created an issue a while ago.
https://github.com/JuliaComputing/JuliaAcademyData.jl/issues/2

Once I install the package, I have no idea what to do next. The readme.md is empty. Most of you seem to have figured it out. Are there step-by-step instructions somewhere?

I’m also having the same SpecialFunctions problem that someone else reported when I try to do directly to the machine learning course and run the notebooks.