Algorithm of the Week: A Look At Coursera's Design and Analysis of Algorithms: Part I | Javalobby
The video lectures (about 2 hours per week) were very good and easy to follow, and Professor Roughgarden is quite good at explaining the different concepts and algorithms. My only wish is that I had the option of reading the material (as presented in a text book) instead of watching it. The slides used in the videos are available for download, but they don't have enough information to be read on their own.
For me it is faster to read than to listen to someone explaining something, it is easier to skim things I already know, and it is easier to go back and forth in a text when something isn't clear. Also, I like the visual structure of the material on the pages – something I don't get from a video. But the main reasons is that it would be faster. Taking the course is quite a big time commitment, especially when you work full time and have a family, and if things can be sped up it's a big plus.
This is a of course a matter of personal taste, and I suspect many people prefer having the material presented in a lecture format. Also, it is possible to speed up the videos (1.25 or 1.5 times the normal speed), which I did make use of sometimes. But for me it still does not beat reading from a book.
The topics I already knew quite well were merge sort, big-O notation, quicksort, and hash tables (in particular hash tables – I use them almost daily when coding). I thought all of these topics were well presented.
I had never heard about the Master Method before, but found both the formula (for finding the big-O performance of recursive algorithms) and the derivation of it quite interesting. I also liked the graph algorithms, in particular the algorithm for finding strongly connected components in a directed graph (the algorithm uses the neat trick of reversing all the edges as one of its steps). The lecture on heaps was interesting – I studied heaps in my class at university, but I had completely forgotten about them. So there it really was a case of needing a refresher (and heap sort now makes total sense too).
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