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Comment by xjtian | Hacker News Reader

I found the video lectures for this course extraordinarily boring compared to the Stanford algorithms courses taught by Roughgarden. Sedgewick is a brilliant computer scientist, but those videos really put me to sleep.

Both classes are still solid offerings from Coursera, but having gone through both levels of both, I'd recommend the Stanford ones first.

Also, I don't know if this has changed, but the programming assignments required a custom Java installation provided by Princeton with a bunch of extra packages specifically for the course. I found that a little weird compared to the Stanford class's approach of just giving you an input file and verifying the output provide (ala a coding competition).

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On the contrary, I found Sedgewick's lectures very interesting. The animations of algorithms using cards, trees, nodes etc. is an excellent way to get a good grasp. It is a solid representation of what you would imagine in your mind while learning algorithms.

Another particularly interesting thing about his lectures is when he shares some stories from his vast experience over the years. For eg. When they named a red-black BST after the best contrasting colours you could get on the first ever color printer built in Xerox PARC. Or his excitement to build an animation for Prim's MST on a personal computer.

Came here to say the same thing, I thought he explained things well and in different ways then I had learned them in the past.

There is no "custom Java installation" required, although they do offer one (called "DrJava") to get people up and running quickly and presumably to make support easier. I used IDEA and it worked just fine.

They do require one JAR file, stdlib.jar, to handle things like file I/O that are boring and take away from the algorithms themselves.

There is a second JAR, algs4.jar that contains all of the completed classes, which is useful if you want to implement one particular algorithm yourself, without going back and implementing the others that it relies on.

> I found the video lectures for this course extraordinarily boring compared to the Stanford algorithms courses taught by Roughgarden. Sedgewick is a brilliant computer scientist, but those videos really put me to sleep.

At the risk of sounding overly negative when it's not intended: they're both very boring lecturers. I actually wonder if that might change a bit when they're interacting with a real audience.

Having actually been in Sedgewick's lectures, I can confirm that his soothing slow monotone is more effective than Nyquil for lulling students to sleep. That said, his course is damn excellent, and I know of no other teachers that have done better at making a course that actually teaches comp sci fundamentals in an approachable way. He's very understandable and clear even when played at 1.5x speed, which I recommend to anyone who isn't having trouble thinking through the concepts faster than he can lecture through them.

for me it was the other way around :) I felt Roughgarden was skimming through the lessons..Sedgewick ,in my opnion is the better teacher

it's the grandfatherly tone...

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