You will also learn how services like Dropbox manage to upload some large files instantly and to save a lot of storage space! What are good strategies to keep a binary tree balanced?
How to implement a hash table so that the amortized running time of all operations is O(1) on average?Ĥ. How priority queues are implemented in C++, Java, and Python?ģ. What is a good strategy of resizing a dynamic array?Ģ. You will also learn typical use cases for these data structures.Ī few examples of questions that we are going to cover in this class are the following:ġ. This will help you to understand what is going on inside a particular built-in implementation of a data structure and what to expect from it. You will learn how these data structures are implemented in different programming languages and will practice implementing them in our programming assignments. In this online course, we consider the common data structures that are used in various computational problems. We invested over 3000 hours into designing our challenges as an alternative to multiple choice questions that you usually find in MOOCs.Ī good algorithm usually comes together with a set of good data structures that allow the algorithm to manipulate the data efficiently. To the best of knowledge, no other online course in Algorithms comes close to offering you a wealth of programming challenges (and puzzles!) that you may face at your next job interview. You will learn algorithms by implementing nearly 100 coding problems in a programming language of your choice.
While these MOOCs focus on theory, our Specialization is a mix of algorithmic theory/practice/applications with software engineering.
This unique combination of skills makes this Specialization different from other excellent MOOCs on algorithms that are all developed by theoretical computer scientists. We tried to fill this gap by forming a diverse team of instructors that includes world-leading experts in theoretical and applied algorithms at UCSD (Daniel Kane, Alexander Kulikov, and Pavel Pevzner), a chief data scientist at Yandex (Michael Levin), and a former software engineer at Google (Neil Rhodes). However, many excellent books and online courses on algorithms, that excel in introducing algorithmic ideas, have not yet succeeded in teaching you how to implement algorithms, the crucial computer science skill that you have to master at your next job interview.
Computer science legend Donald Knuth once said “I don’t understand things unless I try to program them.” We also believe that the best way to learn an algorithm is to program it.