Erlang
We will use Erlang as a programming language in this course so let's spend a lecture on looking at functional programming, concurrency, distributed programming and how things are solved in Erlang.
If you do not have any experience with functional programming before you should not underestimate how long time it will take before you learn Erlang. If you have seen Oz, ML, Scheme, Lisp, Haskel or even Prolog before you should have no problem picking up Erlang.
Remember that this is not a programming course, we expect that can pick up a new language by yourself. Prepare by installing the Erlang programming environment and start reading some of the tutorials that you will find on-line.