I heartily recommend the notebooks published in this course as excellent applied reference material to estimation and optimization.
I love it how code and coursework are intermingled, reminiscing me of Knuth's Literate Programming [1]
My beef with many other courses offered (including Coursera) is that they use Matlab when it's clearly advantageous to use IPython Notebook as a better experimenting environment. For example, Daphne Koeller's PGM course[2] is still in Matlab and no matter what you do the code looks extremely clumsy and hard to read. N.B. I wrote tens of thousands of lines of Matlab code, including GUI programs, but that does not mean it's a good language to use especially in cases like this.