Another great course! I am a little sad since it was only 4 weeks long when the rest were about 5 weeks each. I feel like there may have been another topic (regular expressions?) that could have been covered but these are still great and now I see how we can do string matching in things like text editors and do them in O(n) time. Wonderful series, I've certainly grown a lot in just these past 4 online courses, keep up the great work! My advice to people taking these courses, be prepared to put time and really think about what you're doing. Try applying the things here to things you see in real life and you'll find they have much more relevance. Cheers and good luck!

Fantastic course. I love that this series is really challenging for me. The content covers a lot of ground, and the problems are difficult and make you really understand how to implement the concepts. This course in particular has made me very interested in pattern matching algorithms. I can't quite keep up with the pace, but that's okay because I'm not in a hurry and I can just switch sessions to go at my own speed. I've been recommending Coursera courses to people I know or meet for sometime now. It's my favorite resource for intensive undergraduate and graduate level material on the internet. Good job!

I like the way this course walks through pattern matching step by step. One way of effectively taking the courses in this specialization is to solve a fraction of the assignments in each week, then move on and do the same for the a few following weeks, then after you've reached to a few weeks ahead, return to solve the rest you haven't solved. This way, you will be able to revise what you learned in the past weeks and revisiting them will reinforce the material in your brain. The instructors did a great job preparing real programming challenges!

This course totally blew my mind. I always wondered how programs were able to find patterns in long strings so quickly, well mystery solved. I can't imagine the minds of the people who came up with these algorithms, I found it challenging just to have them explained. The lectures were clear, the assignments were illustrative and challenging. What a great experience.

No complex data structure gave me more problems than the suffix tree. Im used to coding anything, segment tree, lazy segment tree, suffix array, weighted union find, graphs, balanced trees, what ever. Still, i couldn't code a suffix tree until i took this corse. I can tell any one intrested that it's not easy, but their best shot is this course.

The course content was a bit disconnected this time with some missing parts in between. Maybe it would been better to start with simple string matching and basic data structures and only then progress to the genom processing part.

Fortunately the programming assignment cleared a great deal of the confusion. Never the less a very good course!

This course was not my favorite in the Specialization -- the content just wasn't as interesting, making some of the more demanding problems pretty difficult, but nothing was too difficult, given the excellent preparation delivered via the lectures. Everything you need to know for a problem was given right before!

Still, amazing course.

Truly one of the best coding experience I have ever had. The lectures were greatly informative and important in terms of content . The assignments(including the optional questions) were made to test the capability of thorough understanding of the topics . My greatest gratitude to the lecturers who taught the course. Great Experience!!

This was a very good course. A little minus for the lectures/lessons by Pawel. He was very inspiring, but it was a little less crisp (note, just a little, overall it was very good) than the lectures by Michael.

The lectures by Michael on suffix arrays, suffix trees, and KMP, were simply awesome! Pedagocical masterpieces, really!

I still can't believe that there can be so many algorithms on string pattern matching. Lots of interview questions are based on string algorithms and the I believe that the skills I got from this course is definitely going to help to crack interviews in the future.Moreover, I can implement an efficient search engine efficiently.

In my opinion this is not the best course in this specialization as some of the contents seem to be absent and students were referred to their other book/course on Bioinformatics. The course does however introduce most of the important algorithms in strings, coupled with good programming exercises.

The course is the best until now. The explanations area clear, with lots of examples and great challenges. Even with the explanations, I think that it would be better see more constructions of the Suffix Tree by hand. This is: drawing the tree in each step.

There are some too hard algorithms to implement, but it worth it. It allows to develop patience, mental skills and self-education. I highly recommend this course, some algorithms described here are crucial for computer science and must have to know.

Very good course. I learned a lot. The most important part is the assignment. I have not watched all the videos, but checked it only when I am stuck at the programming assignment and the slides are not enough to understand.

Excellent course, I only consider that in the programming task of week number 4 the last problem could be better explained (Suffix Tree from Suffix Array) since it is difficult to understand what the expected output is.

Great content! It gets a little complicated as there are too many notations to keep track of. Probably best to read and re-read a lot several times. Teaching is also very good. Looking forward to the next course.

The course was good but it is little difficult to understand.

Also, it teaches us the algorithms by giving an example of DNA sequencing which is difficult to understand.

But overall the course is pretty good.

Very well put together course. Challenging but understandable. I highly recommend you stick out. If you get stuck check the forums there's lots of helpful things there. Time well spent!

I only wish I could get an 'gold-standard' sample of the programs I wasn't capable of writing after course completion, so I can see where I made my mistakes.

Very well explained and the exercises truely checks your understanding. The level of hardness of this course is medium-hard. So definitely learned a lot.

Excelentes algoritmos, nunca había pensado lo complicado que era hacer pattern matching eficientemente en términos de tiempo de procesamiento y memoria.

great course, interesting concepts and very well delivered content from lecture videos. challenging and rewarding programming assignments.

The course is well designed, concepts are clearly elaborated and taught in depth. Personally, it was a challenging course to complete.

It was awesome. I was very surprised and mesmerized while understanding how the great scientists solved these challenging problems!

The professor explained clearly as usual. The first 3 weeks is not too hard but final week took me really long time to understand.