Computer Science: Algorithms, Theory, and Machines
Princeton University · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne
Computer Science
About the course
This course introduces the broader discipline of computer science to people having basic familiarity with Java programming. It covers the second half of our book Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach (the first half is covered in our Coursera course Computer Science: Programming with a Purpose, to be released in the fall of 2018). Our intent is to demystify computation and to build awareness about the substantial intellectual underpinnings and rich history of the field of computer sc
The consensus
Every one of the 20 reviews we read gave it 4★ or more. This is the most-upvoted one (9 votes).
“This class is not about programming. This class is not about algorithms. It it a good CS 101 introductory course. It is for somebody who already knows math, logic, basic electronics and basic programming to give a taste on what CS is about. Or for somebody like me to refresh memory on rarely used topics.”
Coursera's 4.6 comes from 803 ratings. Of those, 3.0% 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 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗