I would've never forced myself to learn to think recursively if it weren't for this course. As someone from a mechanical engineering discipline, with a minimal background in java programming, i was able to following along with this course and complete all assignments. The discussion boards and professor's lectures were particularly helpful along with the fact that I could download everything for viewing offline.

The best course I have done on Coursera. The authors have put together a great set of lectures and especially programming assignments, which really force you to think about what you are doing rather than go by trial and error. What's more, you can submit these in about a dozen commonly used programming languages so you can practise the language of your choice while learning about algorithms. Highly recommended!

amazing course. if you are looking to know fundamental algorithms like DP, Greedy, divide and conquer this course is amazing.

in my opinion, this course is essential for any software engineer but if you just started your way it is better to know how to write simple programmers and be confident with basic topics like loops, conditions ..etc

i recommend python for every body as a start if you have no knowledge

This course was a great introduction to algorithms. I am a novice programmer at best and had little to no knowledge about algorithms before this course. The concepts and programming assignments were challenging and I did not finish all of them the way I would have liked to but the challenge has made me more knowledgeable and a slightly better coder. Thank you. I will be taking data structures next.

Great introductory course. Lots of details and interesting problem sets. Extremely quick responses with the discussion forum. Great help.

One suggestion would be to be a bit better at explaining things, especially the mathematical proofs. They are quick rigorous, yes, but more emphasis should be given on understanding why in simple, human language. Then we could go over the proof together.

This is the best algorithm course that I have taken, it has its problems but overall complete and the instructors guide you and seem to care for teaching well their subject.

I appreciate the work that you have done here for all of us interested to polish our skills and deepen our knowledge in algorithms.

Keep the good work guys.

*This opinion is based on the complete specialization

This course is really helpful, at first I was submitting my cpp files for the projects and was having a hard time on having it on a passing grade. This course encouraged me to learn how to code using python. I have a hard time understanding the lessons but it's a good thing that I can just go back and play the video over and over again in order for me to understand each lessons.

My programming and algorithm design greatly improved after taking this course. Through the advanced problem sets I was able to appreciate the finer aspects of efficient algorithm designing and I'm sure that I'll improve a lot with courses to come.

I would definitely recommend this course to any one who wishes to improve his/her skill set for designing efficient algorithms.

I think this was a great course wonderfully designed with tons of problem solving assignments.It challenged me a lot and I got to learn a lot of new concepts.The idea of dynamic programming always scared me but now I am quite connfident about it and looking forward to solve more problems based on dynamic programming and completing the next course of the specialization! :)

The course gives a very good insight on how different types of algorithms work, and at the same time lets us think of various ways in which they can be implemented, this really helps in building a very strong base in Algorithms which is absolutely necessary for learning advanced topics. I would really like to thank all the instructors for creating such an amazing course.

The course is a great first course on algorithmic toolbox. I love the way the toolbox serves as a precursor to the more involved courses. In particular, the topic of stress testing is something that MOOCs don't cover in general and lead me to give up in my earlier MOOCs.

All in all, great job professors Sascha, Daniel, Neil, Michael and Pavel.

You guys are awesome.

The content of the course is so good. However, I think the lecturers can do better job if the have more visualisation for what they are saying. A lot of time, I felt that I couldn't follow what they was saying and then, I have to pause the video and look at the pseudo code, it much easier to understand. Btw, thanks a lot for providing such an awesome course.

I really appreciate the way course contents are selected in each course of the specialization , It really gives a great conceptual clarity of all the topics .

I find a bit difficulty in understanding Big O notation so please try to give some more reference to understand it and also provide some general techniques to calculate it from just looking at code.

Having several years of developing enterprise applications, I have really enjoyed my struggle with some assignments. Lectures are great and I want to thank all of the lecturers for their work and patience while working with all of us in Forums. For sure, I have learnt a lot from this course and recommend it to anyone who wants to dive into algorithms.

Excellent course, I learned a lot of new things, I'm starting in the real programming world and this course helped me to learn a lot. I had to do a lot of research in dynamic programming because I wasn't used to solve algorithms of that level and some videos were hard to understand for me, but it actually was quite fun and I really want to continue.

The course provides a solid foundation in understanding algorithms. The lectures, slides and supplemental resources are thoughtfully crafted and were effective in teaching the concepts . The programming assignments provided an avenue to understand and implement the algorithm. Mentors and peers provided ample support through discussions in forums.

It was an amazing experience with University of California San Diego & National Research University Higher School of Economics and also all the assignment were very enjoying. I have learned a lot after completing this course. I will be highly thankful to this university and my instructors for providing me this opportunity. Thank you again !!!

Really good course. Sometimes the accent is a problem but thanks to the subscripts its easily understandable. In general although the course is really good and I learned a lot from it, I found that the course lacks the flow most other coursera courses have as in this the professors keep changing and some have really hard to understand accents.

Great course covering on material needed to analyse and come up with algorithms. I already took a course about Algorithms in my Universtiy but this one helped me refresh the knowledge and add up more in-depth understanding on the topic on top of my previous knowledge. I am really grateful to have come across this course. Thank you very much!

Overall it is a great course, the most challenging part was to understand the optional prove of the Master theorem. I believe that this course and the whole specialization is all about learning not only the mandatory material of the course, but also the whole optional material provided. Thanks to all the instructors for their hard work!

This course introduces you five basic algorithms that commonly are commonly used by programming. Each course has detailed introduction to methods and related assignments. And we could discussed the problem met in the homework in the after-class forum. Thanks to all the teachers and teaching assistants as well as our kind classmates.

The best online class I've taken so far: not only because of the clear explanation and easy-to-follow videos, but also the effort the professors have put int answering most of the questions, especially Prof. Alex. He almost answered more than half of the questions within short amount of time. This is very rarely seen in other moocs.

Really great course for an introduction to greedy, divide-and-conquer and dynamic programming techniques. Programming assignments are challenging for beginners but are really helpful for mastering the concept and materials. Referenced materials are useful to understand the concepts when listening to lectures is not enough.

This course gave me a great refresher on algorithms concepts learned in college. The lectures were clear and explained complex issues in a straightforward and step-by-step manner. I also enjoyed the programming assignments: they were challenging enough to make me think, but not so hard as to take up many hours of my time.

I really want to thank the whole community of coursera to avail me such a great opportunity to get introduce and to be much more familiar with the content of algorithmic toolbox.it helps me to push up my rank in competitive coding contest.Now I am more confident than before at programming.

THANKS to all coursera family.