Free Google Code for Educators tutorials on AJAX web programming, web security etc

Want free online tutorials from Google? Google Code for Educators was recently launched "focused on CS [computer science] topics at the university level, and lets us share the knowledge we've built up around things like distributed systems and AJAX programming. It's designed for university faculty to learn about new computer science topics and include them in their courses, as well as to help curious students learn on their own" and it's "designed to make it easy for CS faculty to integrate cutting-edge computer science topics into their courses".

While aimed at providing teaching material for computer science university educators, some of the info there would be useful for self-learning too, like the AJAX tutorials. I've not had a chance to review everything yet but this looks great, it isn't just academics who will find them useful.

Currently on offer, all generously under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License (i.e. they're free and remixable), are various materials including slides, programming labs, problem sets, background tutorials and videos:

• AJAX web programming tutorials - what's needed to start using Google's AJAX Search and Map APIs:
• CSS, DHTML, JS - "just what you need to know about CSS, DHTML and JavaScript in order to work with AJAX. The pre-requisites are knowledge of (basic) HTML, basic CSS and programming experience with a language such as C++, Java or a scripting language like Javascript, Python or PHP"
• AJAX Tutorial
• AJAX Search API and
  
• video lectures
  
• distributed systems and parallel programming - tutorials
  
• Intro to Design
• Intro to Parallel Programming and MapReduce,
  
• other course material
• video lectures
• web security slides and video lectures.

No doubt the topics and materials will expand so the dedicated curriculum search for materials will become ever useful.

There's a Google Group or forum for Google Code for Educators too.

And don't forget there are also more Google Tech Talk videos.

Other free online tutorials - aimed at non-programmers

While I'm on the subject of free computer-related tutorials, relative beginners who (like me!) have not exactly been coding from the cradle may be interested in other free online tutorials on Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver from Inpics who specialise in providing pictorial tutorials (more pictures, less words, an effective approach) and previously offered free PDF books on the same subjects.

They also have picture-based LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP) tutorials - MySQL, PHP, Perl (they're not planning on Linux server admin or Apache ones in the near future however, sadly). And there are tutorials on Photoshop Elements, and Fireworks, etc too. Also worth checking out.

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