This is a fun and challenging course! Without doubt the most challenging courses I've ever done in coursera!

I have a few suggestions for anyone who is considering to start this course:

1- You have to be a skillful programmer, be comfortable with algorithm design, tree and graphs structures and recursion. Also a general knowledge of models are useful.

2- You have to have enough patience to watch loooooooong videos (but the professor teaches in a pretty awesome and in times, hilarious ways!)

3- You really need to spend +15 hours per week on this course, not only the videos for each week is long but also each programming assignment will take tremendous amount of your time!

4- And finally you should be tough and not give up and sometimes have the courage to write your code again from scratch after failure!

Very difficult. Harder than pretty much all of the courses I've taken in college, more or less, based on how much material is covered and the amount of research you have to do on top of the lectures in order to just get a passing grade on the assignments. Definitely a grad level course, probably harder than most grad level courses I've taken in college just for the amount of effort needed to get a perfect score on all assignments (unfortunately it depends on how good of a computer you have to run your solutions). The challenge just makes it even more fun. Lectures barely covers anything needed to do the assignments, which just gives you a surface level introduction to the concepts needed to solve the problems. The discussion forum is crucial to getting good guidance on how to solve the problems. Pretty much all of the assignments involved doing your own research and reading a bunch of problem-related research papers to figure out what you want to use for your own implementations. I had a blast learning, and thank you so much for offering this course on coursera.

I guess this could be the most challenging course I've had on Coursera.

1, almost all assignments are NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems.

2, data scale can be huge, assessment criteria can be strict.

3. choosing between CP, MIP solver and all kinds of stochastic and meta-heuristic algorithms is fun, gives you the chance to learn both with hands-on experience.

4. even discouraged from doing so, you'll still read a lot of research papers, about 20+ for me.

5. several thousands of SLOC to be expected, if you're honest with yourself.

6. even if you're looking to cheat your way through, you still need solid programming ability and understanding of the problem to do it, so don't bother, why ruin all the fun?

7. the facility location problem drove me nuts.

8. randomization is Pandora's box.

The most challenging course that I've ever enrolled in. The instruction videos are just a 30% of what it takes to get perfect score on the assignments. Its the only course that I feel it was totally worth the time trying to complete it at 100%. Amazing instructor, and I'm totally gonna keep and revisit all of the course videos.

Great course, very challenging as problems are NP-hard and hence force you to find the right approaches for various problem set sizes. After a while, you get hooked and tried to find better and better solutions, reviewing videos for overlooked information, looking at research papers and available resources on the net. Programming times are only a minimum and I spent much more time than indicated.

Most difficult on-line course I've ever had. Demanding and engaging at the same time. Good luck to people without IT background :D.

This course is absoutely excellent. It has really time consuming and challenging programming assignments, but I learned more than I have in a long while. I could not recommend this course more highly, and I have completed 20+ MOOCs. This is one of the best ones by far. :D

Good Course, I had learn a lot of concept of optimization

Excellent Course, I would highly recommend for all algorithmist and programmers. It step by steps teaches how to approach NP-hard problems. The way the professor teaches make this highly difficult subject easy. Of-course assignments are very challenging.

Well structured course, with meaningful and challeging problems.

Very thorough and nice course. Prof. Pascal can make even very difficult things funny and interesting!!

Very interesting course with challenging programming assignments

Excellent course. The programming assignments make you think about optimization

Very good course.

Great course for every software professional.

Wonderful!

Too good course! One of the very best courses on Coursera!

Thank you so much. It is a wonder to follow your course.

Good course. The instructor is really a fast talker and it may be hard to grasp everything at the first time you watch the videos. About the assignments: The assignments are really hard. Yes! Really really hard. I've never taken any MOOC course where the assignments are so hard. Al in all, I can say that this course really thought me something about discrete optimization, and I would love to learn even more about this interesting field.

One of the most challenging and interesting sources among all that I've passed so far. The lector has it's own hilarious style of teaching. All the material is carefully created and well structured. Every time that you pass the programming assignment, you feel that it's a real achievement.

Just excellent. Exceptional teaching and well-formed, realistic assignments. Highly recommended.

The course Materials and instructors are awesome.

This course is very good and essential in my point of view for researchers.

If you want to understand better optimization techniques, this is an excellent Course, the explanations and examples are one of the best, the Course is also very challenging but worth the time and effort, you will learn a lot.

I like the instructor teaching approach and the evaluation system, the subject itself took me a lot of effort and i think the LNS technique should be teached just after local search.

Great instructor, course is taught with passion pouring from the screen. It inspires me a lot!

Great course, with interactive teaching style and fun to learn.