Master Algorithmic Programming Techniques. Advance your Software Engineering or Data Science Career by Learning Algorithms through Programming and Puzzle Solving. Ace coding interviews by implementing each algorithmic challenge in this Specialization. Apply the newly-learned algorithmic techniques to real-life problems, such as analyzing a huge social network or sequencing a genome of a deadly pathogen.

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Neil Rhodes +5 more instructors

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Offered By

Data Structures and Algorithms SpecializationUniversity of California San Diego

What you will learn

Play with 50 algorithmic puzzles on your smartphone to develop your algorithmic intuition! Apply algorithmic techniques (greedy algorithms, binary search, dynamic programming, etc.) and data structures (stacks, queues, trees, graphs, etc.) to solve 100 programming challenges that often appear at interviews at high-tech companies. Get an instant feedback on whether your solution is correct.
Apply the newly learned algorithms to solve real-world challenges: navigating in a Big Network or assembling a genome of a deadly pathogen from millions of short substrings of its DNA.
Learn exactly the same material as undergraduate students in “Algorithms 101” at top universities and more! We are excited that students from various parts of the world are now studying our online materials in the Algorithms 101 classes at their universities. Here is a quote from the website of Professor Sauleh Eetemadi from Iran University of Science and Technology: “After examining syllabus and course material from top universities including Stanford, Princeton and MIT we have chosen to follow the Data Structures and Algorithms Specialization from UCSD...due to excellent course material and its practical approach.”
If you decide to venture beyond Algorithms 101, try to solve more complex programming challenges (flows in networks, linear programming, streaming algorithms, etc.) and complete an equivalent of a graduate course in algorithms!

Skills you will gain

Debugging
Software Testing
Algorithms
Data Structure
Computer Programming
Dynamic Programming
Binary Search Tree
Priority Queue
Hash Table
Stack (Abstract Data Type)
List
Graph Theory

About this Specialization

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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. 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. 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) and a former software engineer at Google (Neil Rhodes). This unique combination of skills makes this Specialization different from other excellent MOOCs on algorithms that are all developed by theoretical computer scientists. While these MOOCs focus on theory, our Specialization is a mix of algorithmic theory/practice/applications with software engineering. You will learn algorithms by implementing nearly 100 coding problems in a programming language of your choice. 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. We invested over 3000 hours into designing our challenges as an alternative to multiple choice questions that you usually find in MOOCs.

Applied Learning Project

The specialization contains two real-world projects: Big Networks and Genome Assembly. You will analyze both road networks and social networks and will learn how to compute the shortest route between New York and San Francisco 1000 times faster than the shortest path algorithms you learn in the standard Algorithms 101 course! Afterwards, you will learn how to assemble genomes from millions of short fragments of DNA and how assembly algorithms fuel recent developments in personalized medicine.

Shareable Certificate

Earn a Certificate upon completion

100% online courses

Start instantly and learn at your own schedule.

Flexible Schedule

Set and maintain flexible deadlines.

Intermediate Level

Basic knowledge of at least one programming language: C++, Java, Python, C, C#, Javascript, Haskell, Kotlin, Ruby, Rust, Scala. Basic knowledge of discrete mathematics: proof by induction, proof by contradiction.

Approximately 8 months to complete

Suggested pace of 6 hours/week

English

Subtitles: English, Arabic, French, Portuguese (European), Italian, Vietnamese, German, Russian, Spanish

Shareable Certificate

Earn a Certificate upon completion

100% online courses

Start instantly and learn at your own schedule.

Flexible Schedule

Set and maintain flexible deadlines.

Intermediate Level

Approximately 8 months to complete

Suggested pace of 6 hours/week

English

Subtitles: English, Arabic, French, Portuguese (European), Italian, Vietnamese, German, Russian, Spanish

How the Specialization Works

Take Courses

A Coursera Specialization is a series of courses that helps you master a skill. To begin, enroll in the Specialization directly, or review its courses and choose the one you'd like to start with. When you subscribe to a course that is part of a Specialization, you’re automatically subscribed to the full Specialization. It’s okay to complete just one course — you can pause your learning or end your subscription at any time. Visit your learner dashboard to track your course enrollments and your progress.

Hands-on Project

Every Specialization includes a hands-on project. You'll need to successfully finish the project(s) to complete the Specialization and earn your certificate. If the Specialization includes a separate course for the hands-on project, you'll need to finish each of the other courses before you can start it.

Earn a Certificate

When you finish every course and complete the hands-on project, you'll earn a Certificate that you can share with prospective employers and your professional network.

There are 6 Courses in this Specialization

Course1

Course 1

Algorithmic Toolbox

4.6

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11,804 ratings

This online course covers basic algorithmic techniques and ideas for computational problems arising frequently in practical applications: sorting and searching, divide and conquer, greedy algorithms, dynamic programming. We will learn a lot of theory: how to sort data and how it helps for searching; how to break a large problem into pieces and solve them recursively; when it makes sense to proceed greedily; how dynamic programming is used in genomic studies. You will practice solving computational problems, designing new algorithms, and implementing solutions efficiently (so that they run in less than a second).

Course2

Course 2

Data Structures

4.6

stars

4,878 ratings

A good algorithm usually comes together with a set of good data structures that allow the algorithm to manipulate the data efficiently. In this online course, we consider the common data structures that are used in various computational problems. You will learn how these data structures are implemented in different programming languages and will practice implementing them in our programming assignments. 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 also learn typical use cases for these data structures.

A few examples of questions that we are going to cover in this class are the following: 1. What is a good strategy of resizing a dynamic array? 2. How priority queues are implemented in C++, Java, and Python? 3. How to implement a hash table so that the amortized running time of all operations is O(1) on average? 4. What are good strategies to keep a binary tree balanced? You will also learn how services like Dropbox manage to upload some large files instantly and to save a lot of storage space!

Course3

Course 3

Algorithms on Graphs

4.7

stars

2,138 ratings

If you have ever used a navigation service to find optimal route and estimate time to destination, you've used algorithms on graphs. Graphs arise in various real-world situations as there are road networks, computer networks and, most recently, social networks! If you're looking for the fastest time to get to work, cheapest way to connect a set of computers into a network or efficient algorithm to automatically find communities and opinion leaders in Facebook, you're going to work with graphs and algorithms on graphs.

In this online course, you will first learn what a graph is and what are some of the most important properties. Then you'll learn several ways to traverse graphs and how you can do useful things while traversing the graph in some order. We will then talk about shortest paths algorithms — from the basic ones to those which open door for 1000000 times faster algorithms used in Google Maps and other navigational services. You will use these algorithms if you choose to work on our Fast Shortest Routes industrial capstone project. We will finish with minimum spanning trees which are used to plan road, telephone and computer networks and also find applications in clustering and approximate algorithms.

Course4

Course 4

Algorithms on Strings

4.5

stars

1,001 ratings

World and internet is full of textual information. We search for information using textual queries, we read websites, books, e-mails. All those are strings from the point of view of computer science. To make sense of all that information and make search efficient, search engines use many string algorithms. Moreover, the emerging field of personalized medicine uses many search algorithms to find disease-causing mutations in the human genome. In this online course you will learn key pattern matching concepts: tries, suffix trees, suffix arrays and even the Burrows-Wheeler transform.

Instructors

Offered by

University of California San Diego

UC San Diego is an academic powerhouse and economic engine, recognized as one of the top 10 public universities by U.S. News and World Report. Innovation is central to who we are and what we do. Here, students learn that knowledge isn't just acquired in the classroom—life is their laboratory.

Industry Partners

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the refund policy?
If you subscribed, you get a 7-day free trial during which you can cancel at no penalty. After that, we don’t give refunds, but you can cancel your subscription at any time. See our full refund policy.
Can I just enroll in a single course?
Yes! To get started, click the course card that interests you and enroll. You can enroll and complete the course to earn a shareable certificate, or you can audit it to view the course materials for free. When you subscribe to a course that is part of a Specialization, you’re automatically subscribed to the full Specialization. Visit your learner dashboard to track your progress.
Is financial aid available?
Yes. In select learning programs, you can apply for financial aid or a scholarship if you can’t afford the enrollment fee. If fin aid or scholarship is available for your learning program selection, you’ll find a link to apply on the description page.
Can I take the course for free?
When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Specialization, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. If you only want to read and view the course content, you can audit the course for free. If you cannot afford the fee, you can apply for financial aid.
Is this course really 100% online? Do I need to attend any classes in person?
This course is completely online, so there’s no need to show up to a classroom in person. You can access your lectures, readings and assignments anytime and anywhere via the web or your mobile device.
What will I be able to do upon completing the Specialization?
You will be able to apply the right algorithms and data structures in your day-to-day work and write programs that work in some cases many orders of magnitude faster. You'll be able to solve algorithmic problems like those used in the technical interviews at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yandex, etc. If you do data science, you'll be able to significantly increase the speed of some of your experiments. You'll also have a completed Capstone either in Bioinformatics or in the Shortest Paths in Road Networks and Social Networks that you can demonstrate to potential employers.
What background knowledge is necessary?
1. Basic knowledge of at least one programming language: C++, Java, Python, C, C#, Javascript, Haskell, Kotlin, Ruby, Rust, Scala.
We expect you to be able to implement programs that: 1) read data from the standard input (in most cases, the input is a sequence of integers); 2) compute the result (in most cases, a few loops are enough for this); 3) print the result to the standard output. For each programming challenge in this course, we provide starter solutions in C++, Java, and Python. The best way to check whether your programming skills are enough to go through problems in this specialization is to solve two problems from the first week. If you are able to pass them (after reading our tutorials), then you will definitely be able to pass the course.
2. Basic knowledge of discrete mathematics: proof by induction, proof by contradiction.
Knowledge of discrete mathematics is necessary for analyzing algorithms (proving correctness, estimating running time) and for algorithmic thinking in general. If you want to refresh your discrete mathematics skills, we encourage you to go through our partner specialization — Introduction to Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science (https://www.coursera.org/specializations/discrete-mathematics). It teaches the basics of discrete mathematics in try-this-before-we-explain-everything approach: you will be solving many interactive puzzles that were carefully designed to allow you to invent many of the important ideas and concepts yoursel
What is the difference between this course and other courses covering algorithms?
We believe that learning the theory behind algorithms (like in most Algorithms 101 courses taught at 1000s universities) is important but not sufficient for a professional computer scientist today. This specialization combines the theory of algorithms with many programming challenges. In contrast with many Algorithms 101 courses, you will implement over 100 algorithmic problems in the programming language of your choice. And you will see yourself that the best way to understand an algorithm is to implement it!
How long does it take to complete the Specialization?
Time to completion can vary based on your schedule, but most learners are able to complete the Specialization in 6-8 months.
How often is each course in the Specialization offered?
Each course in the Specialization is offered on a regular schedule, with sessions starting about once per month. If you don't complete a course on the first try, you can easily transfer to the next session, and your completed work and grades will carry over.
What background knowledge is necessary?
Basic knowledge of at least one programming language (C/C++, Java, Python): loops, arrays, stacks, recursion. Basic knowledge of mathematics: proof by induction, proof by contradiction.
Do I need to take the courses in a specific order?
We recommend taking the courses in the order presented, as each subsequent course will build on material from previous courses.
Will I earn university credit for completing the Specialization?
Coursera courses and certificates don't carry university credit, though some universities may choose to accept Specialization Certificates for credit. Check with your institution to learn more.
Do I need to buy a textbook for this specialization?
The lectures in this specialization will be self-contained. Most lectures will be based on the bestselling textbook "Algorithms" co-authored by Sanjoy Dasgupta from University of California at San Diego as well as Christos Papadimitriou and Umesh Vazirani from University of California at Berkeley. In addition to UCSD and Berkeley, the textbook has been adopted in over 100 top universities and is available on Internet.

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