[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.

none

Should explain more and the content became boring sometime.

Needs more description & more practise problem

Pros:

Effort has been taken in putting up the assignments.

Cons:

Quality of teaching is very poor and too fast to follow through . Instructors have rushed to present course material . I would not recommend this course . Princeton and Stanford offer much higher quality and presentation on the same topics.

Some of the assignments seemed overly complicated and irrelevant to the topics discussed. On a few occasions the videos would mention something but never discuss the reasoning. Once I posted to the forum and no one answered so I never asked about the other questions I found during the videos.

cannot switch session

Tree exercise had absolutely no relevant video material. Videos give zero context for why data structures are important or when they are used....Should take a lesson from the Stanford course.

Wow. I cannot express enough how terrible this specialization is. Only one of the professors speaks english! The lectures give trivial examples while the homework problems are unbelievably difficult. The starter files often times do not set us up to solve the problem in an optimal way. Homework problems cannot be solved when we are only give 1 hour of video lectures!

I will be taking my $$$ to edx.org

For some assignments there is ONE tricky test that fails your solution and you are forced to blindly try to figure out this one tricky input(though your solution works for all of the tests you perform in addition to the one listed in the task). You end up spending lots of time trying to figure out this one test case instead of actually learning.

The coursework for this course is not bad. But unfortunately, I was unable to find any help on questions on their discussion forum by the teaching assistants and professors monitoring the course. The course material was based on deriving and proving standard proofs versus trying to explain the underlying concept. I do not believe that this course was worth my money. All the knowledge I obtained in this course could have been obtaining from Data Structures and Algorithms by Micheal Goodrich and Roberto Tamasia. There were occasional references to stackoverflow among the course resources which I feel is not professional (though a good source of information).

Worse than the first course. I expected something that is not academic-like explanation, which I can't find it here.

Please bring back those explanations style similar to the first course.

I'm honestly quite pissed. The material itself is fine but I have had a terrible experience working with the instructors. I don't think I will continue taking these courses.

I don't appreciate the amount of time and effort given into the programming assignments only to receive practically zero help. First of all, I don't know WHY I'm failing the test cases, I just am. Your program runs through maybe 100 tests to ensure correctness but somehow the instructors decide you should only see the first 3. But then, I try posting on the forums to receive help only to have it removed. Quite frankly, I have spent well over 10 hours at this point on a single problem and I've created my own tests and I have looked at all the very vague hints given in the forums and I still have no clue what to do. I have school, a job, and yet I'm losing all this productivity because I'm running all these damn tests hoping on the off-chance that I catch whatever weird bug it is that's failing my code. All I want is real, concrete feedback.

Terrible course, especially on the part of Dr. Kulikov. Terrible!!!

Lack of coding practice and didn't focus on the elaboration of Core Data structure. Better explanation will work.

topics are not explained in detail and the program implementation is not taught