A video preview is available for Doug Schmidt's upcoming free MOOC with Vanderbilt University via Coursera:

Pattern-Oriented Software Architectures for Concurrent and Networked Software

Next session: Starts March 4 (8 weeks long)

Workload: 4-6 hours/week

Douglas C. Schmidt is a Professor of Computer Science, Associate Chair of the Computer Science and Engineering program, and a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, all at Vanderbilt University. He has also been the Chief Technology Officer for the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was responsible for directing the technical vision and strategic R&D investments.

C++ developers will know of Doug particularly because of his widely-acclaimed ACE and related libraries.

We asked Doug to provide an overview in his own words of what you can expect to see in the course and how it relates to C++11 in particular:

After a short ~45 minute intro to the topics covered in the course, the rest of the videos are divided into the following sections:

• [~3 hours] Intro to concurrency and networking, which provides background info at the OS and middleware levels.  This part focuses on concepts and is largely language-neutral.
• [~7 hours] Intro to patterns and frameworks, which provides coverage of pattern-oriented software architecture, with an emphasis on concurrent and networked software.  Small C++ and Java examples are shown throughout, though the main focus of this section is more on design techniques rather than programming, per se.
• [~6 hours] Applying patterns and frameworks to develop concurrent and networked software, which examines *lots* of C++ code.  A high-performance HTTP web server is used as a running example to illustrate patterns and frameworks in practice.  80-90% of the focus is on C++ here, with some examples showing how you can do similar types of things in Java to demonstrate the generality of pattern and framework techniques.
• [~3 hours] An appendix that provides an overview of C++ (including C++11 features), a case study of fundamental "Gang of Four" patterns that aren't directly related to concurrent and networked software, and other background information that may be of interest to some course participants.