Any other takers ? 2018-01-15 coursera UCSD Data Structures and Algorithms classes

I’m going to start the first class in the UCSD Algorithms set tomorrow Monday Jan 15.

My intention is to do the entire set of 6 courses, one at a time, in order.
(caveat: If I end up getting a job, I will probably have to discontinue taking these classes).

Any one else ?

< rambling old guy story >

(at my last job, someone made a big error in their graph solution for finding a minimum path for a partial graph problem. The stanford coursera class on algorithms informed me about the theoretical requirements of the ‘Kruskal Method’ for solving the minimum path of a complete graph. The algorithm for the minimum path for a partial graph, used Kruskal’s solution to figure out a part of the answer. From what I learned about Kruskal, I could plainly see that the algorithm used in the partial graph solution was violating the theoretical requirements for the full graph solution. The solution was wrong. Knowing what conditions were violated made it easy to construct a simple test that demonstrated the error. I fixed the algorithm by including the required conditions that I learned about in the coursera class. How cool is that ? The coursera class really prepared me to solve a difficult real world problem ! )

</ rambling old guy story >

Even though I’ve taken and recommend the Stanford version of algorithms, it never hurts to review things, and surely there will be new things to learn in the San Diego version of the class(es).

While coursera has good facilities for remote participants to communicate with each other… Sometimes having ‘real’ contact can provide something a bit more than can be gotten via communication by typed messages.

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last call to get started !

The course has over 100 programming assignments !

Just the thing to get immersed in the presented topics and walk away having learned a lot by understanding theory and having lots of practice…
For the next N weeks I’ll probably switch over from codewars, to the assignments in this class to provide the opportunity to get some programming practice done

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It looks interesting. I’d join you, but I’m already having trouble keeping up with my three study projects at the moment. :slight_smile:

yes. I have suspended my codewars activities because this course is taking up a bit of time…

Is there anyone else looking to study offline and online together?
I would like to form a study group or partner.

Yes, possibly this would work for me. I seriously considered the UCSD course, but chicked out due to lack of (time) commitment. An online study group might work for me.

Hi Marty and Emily,
Thanks for your interests !
The situation for me now is:
o I’m deep into week 4 of the UCSD Algorithms #1 course.
o Since it costs $$ on a monthly subscription (not by class), I don’t really want to stop right now to wait for others to catch up on 4 weeks worth of work.
o After 4 weeks I can say that I recommend the Stanford course taught my Tim Roughgarden over what I have experienced with the UCSD course so far. The reason is primarily that of the focus. The Stanford course spends quite a bit of time going through the theories behind the algorithms while the UCSD course, so far, is more like a presentation and application of techniques… So I guess one is more like a theory class and the other is more about the nuts and bolts.

That said, I intend to keep on with the UCSD courses just to get the exercise and to pick up any helpful and interesting ideas that were not covered by the Stanford course.

Other thing:
The priorities for my personal evening time will be dictated by my first love in life: classical ballet… so… if there is a conflicting ballet class some evening, the ballet class will get priority…

All’s not lost though… I’ve had OK experiences communicating via messenger when face to face wasn’t practical: e.g. working on projects with people located in the Ukraine… The difference between the chat offered by the algorithms classes and a chat that we might have is that we feel a connection/obligation to answer ‘our’ our messages whereas we might not feel the same about all of the messages in the larger official course related chat room.

Don’t know what you guys/gals think about that ?

p.s. I don’t think that there is a strict order WRT the series of UCSD algorithm classes so it’s possible that we can start one of the other courses in the series in a coordinated fashion to share the experience…

Also, I don’t know what ‘level’ of programming you are at but if it turns out that I’m more senior, I’m happy to be giving out more help than taking…

If the tables are reversed, in turn, I hope you’d be willing to field all my questions, confused as they might be :slight_smile:

p.p.s.
Another possibility for shared learning might be to collaborate on codewars problems:

Again, like the online class learning environment, codewars has forums to facilitate communication between users. If we wanted closer collaboration we could just use an off platform messenger for personal communication.

I’ve started a main algorithms thread at the link below. You can find some related threads there. I’ve just sent out an email newsletter to try to get more people to comment there.

The structure of Code Self Study is very loose, so groups will require a certain level of self-organization. :slight_smile:
(I can help connect people though.)