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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Computer Science: Programming with a Purpose by Princeton University

4.7
stars
1,221 ratings

About the Course

The basis for education in the last millennium was “reading, writing, and arithmetic;” now it is reading, writing, and computing. Learning to program is an essential part of the education of every student, not just in the sciences and engineering, but in the arts, social sciences, and humanities, as well. Beyond direct applications, it is the first step in understanding the nature of computer science’s undeniable impact on the modern world. This course covers the first half of our book Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach (the second half is covered in our Coursera course Computer Science: Algorithms, Theory, and Machines). Our intent is to teach programming to those who need or want to learn it, in a scientific context. We begin by introducing basic programming elements such as variables, conditionals, loops, arrays, and I/O. Next, we turn to functions, introducing key concepts such as recursion, modular programming, and code reuse. Then, we present a modern introduction to object-oriented programming. We use the Java programming language and teach basic skills for computational problem solving that are applicable in many modern computing environments. Proficiency in Java is a goal, but we focus on fundamental concepts in programming, not Java per se. All the features of this course are available for free. People who are interested in digging deeper into the content may wish to obtain the textbook Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach (upon which the course is based) or to visit the website introcs.cs.princeton.edu for a wealth of additional material. This course does not offer a certificate upon completion....

Top reviews

VS

May 13, 2019

Beautiful course. I am a software developer with 10+ years of experience in programming and have never realized depth of actual MATH behind all that I do. Thank you Robert Sedgewick, you are the BEST.

PK

Aug 6, 2023

This was a very great course to learn a powerful programming language, techniques used. This has changed my life for better and am looking forward to a career change into the programming world.

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By bhadresh p

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Feb 7, 2023

great

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Dec 24, 2022

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Jun 23, 2022

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Jan 7, 2024

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By way

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Aug 23, 2021

good

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Dec 10, 2023

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By Prem S

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Aug 9, 2023

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By MOHAMED A A E

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Dec 23, 2022

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By Cristian D G G

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Jan 17, 2023

Excelent course but some contents that are evaluated are not in the lectures and are lacking documentation (e.g. In object, BarChart class, Std* libraries), which turns the homeworks more difficult than they should be if those things were explained or a proper documentation page was given.

Don't really like the use of libraries that were built for the course like StdIn, StdOut, etc. Since when not having those libraries available (when really programming), one wouldn't be able to actually implement it.

By Travis D

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May 16, 2022

Very detailed course, went into further depth into some points that Harvard's CS50 didn't. Good warmup to going deeper into algorithms. However some exercises are quite difficult to understand or I feel weren't explained clearly and it can be a bit restricting to only be able to use Intellij to utilise their in house library. The marking system that they have set up can also be a little bit rigid where your answer is right but you have to rewrite the code to accommodate how the course marks the code.

By Milind P

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Jan 14, 2021

Not quite beginner level course when dealing with assignments so some students might find themselves little frustrated. But with the difficulty of assignments, the learning opportunity is great once you finish assignments successfully with help of forum and other research. Book-site could be made little more extensive as currently it is very condensed compared to what chapters in book might have. Overall great course and learning.

By Brad K

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Aug 26, 2021

The course info implies that this is an introduction to programming for non-programmers, essentially a college 100-level course. The provided information in the lectures does good job at building up the student's information about how to build a program. However, several of the programming assignments dial the difficulty up to a 200- or 300-level algorithms class which might lead to frustration on the part of the student.

By Oluwatosin A

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Jul 23, 2020

This course was detailed and helpful. I don't know if this matters a lot, but it bothers me that this course teaches students to use its own libraries. I think the students may not be able to use the actual Java standard libraries well.

Also, I find many assignments hard to understand, most likely because the instruction is not clear enough.

But overall, this course was very nice and interesting.