Algorithms, Part I
Princeton University · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Kevin Wayne, Robert Sedgewick
Computer Science
About the course
This course covers the essential information that every serious programmer needs to know about algorithms and data structures, with emphasis on applications and scientific performance analysis of Java implementations. Part I covers elementary data structures, sorting, and searching algorithms. Part II focuses on graph- and string-processing algorithms. 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 text
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (247 votes, 2.0★).
“I am a bit dissapointed for the fact that this forces people to code in Java. Need to provide flexibility for someone coming from C/C++/Python who are well versed and can code in those. It becomes more of programming hurdle than logic implementation.”
Coursera's 4.9 comes from 12,152 ratings. Of those, 0.9% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 22 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗