Learner Reviews & Feedback for Data Structures by University of California San Diego

The final module with the Splay tree is way too difficult when compared to the rest of the material in the course. This course would be better structured with three assignments as follows: 1) tree order problem, 2) a simpler tree assignment that only deals with a basic binary search tree, 3) the set range sum problem implementing the splay tree, as an advanced problem. Aside from the difficulty of the last module, this is a great course. It's very comprehensive and you'll take away lots of useful information on course completion.

This course was well planned and the lectures were very good. I feel like I learned a lot from the course. Most of the programming assignments were good and helpful for learning, but I found 1 of the hash table assignments and 2 of the binary search trees assignments to be very difficult and time consuming. I would prefer the assignments to be doable in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe the really difficult assignments could be marked as optional. I also think the time estimates for doing the assignments are way too low.

A great interest generating course that gives us both an insight as well as an opportunity to explore the vast field of algorithms and data structures. I recommend to anyone that wants to start in this field as well as to those that are well-versed in this field as it will definitely teach you something new (if not new than a different perspective to looking at the same problem will definitely be provided) :).

Kudos, cheers and all the luck to my fellow learners, our teachers and to the students yet to undertake this course,

Excellent course in general, and I learned a lot of new data structures that one doesn't generally learn about in standard algorithms and data structures courses, like disjoint sets and splay trees.

Only complaint is that sometimes the problems are too complicated for how easy they are. By this I mean that the problem statement is very long and elaborate, when what they are really asking is something trivial that can be programmed in a few lines, but it takes a while to understand just what they are asking.

Great course! I figured disjoint sets was pretty interesting - the rest of the material I get by with no issues, but boy: the BST advanced assignments (splay trees) in week 6 is by far the hardest assignments I tried in both Algorithmic Toolbox and Data Structures. It's a pretty big jump in difficulty (I don't think they explained splay trees in the lectures very well; it was pretty fast), but I was so ecstatic when I solved it that I didn't mind.

This course is very hard for non-STEM major student, even non CS-major student. Some concepts are very abstract to explain. The course team generally did a good job at explaining concept, but it would be better if they can offer more examples, animations, illustrations, sample code and explanations, etc. to help students understand these concepts. A rewarding course overall. Best if you are going to have a code interview.

This course was considerably harder than the first one. Content is top quality but slides lack detail and lectures some times don't do a good job explaining things well enough given the difficulty of some of the things they ask in the exercises. Still, I learned a lot of programming doing the exercises and I would still recommend it. If you're new to algorithms you will have to supplement using online resources + books.

The last two weeks felt rushed. The Binary Search Tree/AVL Tree module doesn't have a quiz or an assignment and it's easy to move on without fully understanding both data structures. This allows for wasting time on the last assignment which relies on understanding AVL trees. I recommend reading the external resources for each lesson and making sure you have a grasp of the data structure before moving to the next module.

This is a great course which gives you the basic understanding required in handling data structures along with some state of the art techniques and applications for those structures. Had a little difficulty in following binary search trees because of the pace of the course and lacking detailed explanation at places. But overall it is a really good course to get up to speed on some of the most used Data Structures.

The course is overall really good. I learned a lot about data structures and got experience applying them for various problems. The majority of the lecturers were also good and they explained the topics in a clear and precise manner. However, the lecturer for week 5 and week 6 didn't explain the topics that he covered very clearly in my opinion. Overall I had a really good experience during the course.

Really good course. I learned a lot and enjoyed the instruction style as well as the way the exercises and assignments were graded.

I would've given the course 5 stars were it not for the final assignment which was made very difficult not so much by the content but by the code sample we were meant to extend... It was full of global state and mutation, very hard to follow and frustrating to work with.

This is a very good course. The only thing I had problems with was the way the tests were set up - they were giving me no information about why my code was failing. I understand the reasoning behind not releasing test cases in failing tests, but like me - a lot of people keep submitting and failing, and in the end getting discouraged . Suggesting modification of test case outputs in the future.

I loved that I had a lot of really tough but relevant problems to code and solve. I only wish the presenters were more visual. With so many splitting, inserting, merging and deleting, I was hoping for some animation on the slides in the video rather than the presenters simply waving their hands. The books for supplemental reading were really helpful along with watching the videos. a few times

First weeks are awesome, it is a great course if you want understand very well some structures like heaps or union/find. I just think the last week is too fast and concise, I would like some additional work about trees and for many users could be a problem, otherwise will be a 5 stars without any doubt, though for me this course worked very well.

This course is challenging, and it is very informative. It would be great if it has smaller problems in which one can implement the data structures discussed in the lectures. In general the course is well explained, but the guy who explains about hash tables needs to provide further explanations or resources.

The quality of the course is very high. However I give a slightly lower rating than for the Class 1 from the specialization. The assignments seemed little unbalanced this time - some were very easy while other were very hard (I passed one after loading a special package to manipulate data or recursion limit).

Some of the exercise files were too time consuming to debug. In general, I would also prefer more rigour in the mathematics, but I am a maths student so probably have a less than common view on this matter. Overall though, this is a very good course, I found myself enjoying hashing and trees units the most.

While the learning material is excellent, on par on that of course 1, I think that coding assignments are really tough, maybe too much so. Even the very first assignment of every week, usually at warm-up level- has been very complicated. Something more gradual would have been nice.

The course is well structured and smooth. The content is rich and really covers the important stuff in data structures.

However, still, the problems come from the interface and the grading system, please Coursera you can do better than this in the discussion forum and the grader.

Another good course, though the last two weeks were a lot harder to follow than the prior ones. Not because the material was that much harder, but the lectures and homeworks were less clear (a lot of descriptions of how to do various operations without explaining why).

I liked the course overall. It helped me a lot, and I saw the positive effects in a short period of time. But please change the hashmap course with something else. It was pain to watch since the instructor just read some theoretical stuff from the slides. Thanks.

This course is very good for those who are trying to learn Data structure. well you have to have some basic knowledge of the programming languages like python, c++, java for the programming assignments.

Very good course for intermediate level. Thank you so much!

It is a very useful course .

I had some problems with implementing the concepts as codes , I think the assignments have to be more easy to code without losing the main idea of them.

I am so happy and thankful for every teacher , they were all amazing :)

First 3 weeks were great (as in first course of specialization), but material in last two weeks was very hard to understand. Feels some mess in explanations compared to other part of the course. Maybe its because of difficulty of the last weeks topics.

Generally good, Russian lectures's pseudo-code is kind of giving me a hard time, guess I'm just not used to that style of notation, content of week 6 rises a bit steep, people might have hard time keeping up. Problem set was good though.