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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

> Nicest: Andrew Ng, Machine Learning, Coursera. Interesting topic, well-planned material, very well avoids going into the mathy details, but still conveys a feeling of understanding of the topic, so accessible to a wide audience. (Martin Odersky, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Coursera, was almost equally nice, but had some rough edges in the first run.)

Have to agree with all of this. I've taken Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course (only time I've paid for a 'verified' certificate), and found it a great overview of ML, though I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable telling anyone I have a good understanding of ML :)

Odersky's FP in Scala was actually the first Coursera course I took (during its initial run, I think). -- I also found the follow up Reactive Programming course to be excellent as well.

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I too loved Odersky's course. It was definitely rough, but having the creator of a language teach a course about it provided insights that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

The Odersky's course is phenomenal. Highly recommended and it shows how much attention and craftmanship was put into designing Scala. Bonus: Martin speaks like Arnold and it's very enjoyable to have a "Terminator" voice teaching you complicated material.

I normally speed up his lectures to 1.25x. I love the lectures but 1.25 just sounds so good!

Interestingly, you took the same path I did with Scala and ML. My criticism about these courses is that some of the projects and content can be too easy to get right, skimming on the surface in some areas that would need more time to grok. Lately I've moved to Udacity and there I can find more in-depth projects and discussions with virtual classmates. The price is steep but you pay for what you are getting.

Agreed Ng's Machine Learning and Odersky's FP in Scala were my favorites. I'm looking for a good bioinformatics course at the moment. I wrote a small program for my daughter that attempts to find CRISPR sites for my daughter and it would be great to know more of the background.

The UCSD bioinformatics algorithms courses on Coursera are fantastic: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/bioinformatics

Have you seen this before?

https://www.edx.org/micromasters/bioinformatics

I wish I enjoyed Andrew Ng's Deep Learning courses. For him being the cofounder of Coursera the production quality (audio/video) was pretty lacking. The whine/distortion on the audio made it difficult to listen to on headphones. Many of the exercises were either a bit too railsroaded and simple, or poorly explained in their goals and barely worked. I really didn't like his style of writing on the digital whiteboard. Perhaps just a side effect of a MOOC, but he never checks for understanding in even the most basic of ways.

While I'm not perfect, I spent nearly 3 years teaching at a bootcamp fulltime, so perhaps I have different standards for communicating and teaching actionable lessons?

+100 to Andrew NGs machine learning. Inspired me enough about the potential of online education to start a (now reasonably successful edtech) company!

That's nice. Which edtech company is that?

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