good

good

good

Good

good

good

GOOD

nice

good

good

Good

good

good

Nice

good

good

good

...

gg

NA

.

[Slightly updated according to Michael's questions]

The course is fine, but comparing to the previous one - Algorithmic Toolbox - this one is weaker and with lesser quality.

Pros: the course contains some interesting data structures and valuable observations. The starter files for assignments are in place. Related books are given after each video session. All the tasks have automatic grader. There is a couple of interesting tasks to do.

Cons: the material is mostly lectures, and there is even a video where lecturer just reads the article from Wiki (Splay tree - has the same information with same lack of some proofs). Expected: add quizzes as it was in the first course. The course has less weeks - only 4 as comparing to 5 in AT. So various important data structures are not discussed. The course has less homework - 3 tasks each week as comparing to 5 in AT. And all 3 are usually just implementations of some basic algos seen in lectures.

I consider the course valuable due to a number of good videos and a couple of good tasks to do. But in general, this course has the area for improvement.

The structure of the class follows the regular academic model you'll find in college: lecture -> lecture -> lecture -> assignment... repeat. I don't think this model is suitable for online delivery. Without discussion and the ability to interrupt and ask questions, the lectures are at times a more frustrating than useful (especially with Coursera's user interface, which lacks quick rewind and is generally speaking rather poorly thought out).

For many of the topics, better videos exist online (try safari or pluralsight). As for the problems, they were the main source of learning, but were also at times a bit frustrating (the splay trees starter code was rather sad to look at). I find that hacker rank is probably better at delivering value (if you can forego the warm fuzzy feeling you get from getting a verified certificate, you'll probably be better served by practicing on hacker rank than from doing the problems in this course).

Great set of topics, really good programming challenges. Lectures are NOT very helpful, mostly reading pseudocode from slides which don't make it easy to grasp the concept. Mostly I had to use other resources to understand what the lecture is about. Also, I was hoping that programming tasks will be set up the same way as in the Algorithmic Toolbox course where I could import/submit automatically everything to Coursera. For this course, none of the exercises were available in Pycharm for Edu.

The depth and explanation of theoretical concepts are better than the first course. I like the in depth discussion over various introduced data structures, for instance there are comparisons between naive implementations vs smarter implementations. However overall the topic is very theoretical, maybe add a little more connection of each introduced data structure with respect to its application would make the topic less dry and more motivating.