First, the course has no coherence. Second, it has almost no practical utility. It goes extremely deep into theory, looking like it was designed to fill as much time as possible. For example, why so much time was spent on vector spaces and rigorous mathematical definitions of distance - is bewildering...

I did come across a few gems - in particular, the explanation of different p-norm distances is good; also the quote from "Now You See It" ultimately led me to Tufte's books.

I understand it's a free "course", so there is nothing to complain about... But if you plan to learn anything useful and applicable, look elsewhere.

Good Course

The lectures are excellent and the quizzes fairly assess the content presented. However, as discussed bu numerous people in the use Forum, a malfunction is present that prevents submission of programming assignments. Also, the assignments assume familiarity with Python or SQl that extends beyond the video instructions. Like other participants have document, I too have escalated to Coursera without any resolution.

The concepts were clearly explained in a practical manner. I am already able to upon it.

I would have liked to complete this course; however, I kept getting malformed error messages when I tried to submit the programming assignments. Apparently, other students have had similar issues based upon comments in the discussion forums. I have tried to get help with the errors through the Discussion Forum and the Coursera Help Center, but so far I haven't been able to get them resolved. It's been two weeks since I reported the issue to Coursera.