i went through this course just for a quick refresh on some basic algorithms and i ended completing all three courses from the specialization! the explanations from Pr.Sriram Sankaranarayanan are crystal clear and the way he presents the material is super! i finnaly understood dynamic programming and P-NP complexity classes, topics that were very comfusing for me. Thank you Proffesor!

Excellent. This course covers some difficult topics, but the lectures and homework assignments were superb and made them quite approachable.

Excellent course! I really learned alot and enjoyed all the challenges and topics in your course. Thank you so much!

What is the point of the discussion boards if no one responds? There is no way to get help if you need it.

Assignment language should be clearly mentioned.

very good courses

d

Very good course. The only problem was the lack of support on the forum. For example, when I posted a question about the forth week's assignment I noticed that the was only one other post there from nine moths ago. That person never got a reply whereas I did.

Interesting topics, but the programming assignments are extremely difficult and made the class feel tedious. I eventually solved them, but would not reccommend the experience.

The course is badly designed and is not a par with the previous 2 courses.

① the 1st week courses was daunting and convoluted. It was meant to introduce the idea of divide and conquer which the previous courses have involved a little bit, but it spent a great deal of time introducing Fourier transform without elaborating it clearly (actually I have to watch more relevant videos on Yotube to get it across). What's worse, the quizz and assignment are focused on the math theorem of Fourier transform instead of more concret cases of divide and conquer algorithm.

② the 2nd week is about dynamic programming, which is probably the most difficuly one in the course because it's rather abstract and hard to implement & debug in programming. I do appreciate that the instructor has been persisting in blackboard writing for the whole series, but honestly I believe it would be more vivid if those cases taught in the class could be visualized by plots/tables and it would be much more helpful if there could be at least one video leading us walk through the python codes and show us how to debug when there's error. The reason why I propose such ideas is because when I was doing the assignment, I found it very hard to conceive a proper data structure and troubleshoot the code when the answer was incorrect with no other prompt.

③ the 3rd week around greedy algorithms is realtively nice and concise. By comparison, the 1st and 2nd week are truly freting.

④ the 4th week's content is not vague, just looking quite irrevelant at first glimpse though. However, the assignment is quite hard to pass because is sets time limit for running the codes, but what is contradicting is that the course is about non-deterministic polynomial problems which cannot be solved effciently. So it puzzles me a lot because there's almost no way to find a faster solution. I saw other people were raising similar problems in the forum too, but unfortunately there's no helpful advice given by teaching assistants (honestly they seldom reply).

This course save me time on learning the dynamic programming. I really love the 4-steps to construct the dynamic programming. It gives me the guideline when designing DP solution.

Great work from professor Sriram Sankaranarayanan explaining such complex material. I wish we could review more examples during the class (specially Dynamic Programming ones).

I totally loved all the courses from this instructor. The content was rich, the programming assignments were instructive, and the whole course was so engaging.

Great course

Excellent!

underexplained, messy, many typos, unorganized