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Comment by henrik_w | Hacker News Reader

I've taken several Coursera courses all the way since the beginning. My general impression is that the quality has gone down. Personally, I don't care about the certificates. I think a much better way to demonstrate that you have taken a course is to apply what you have learned, or blog about it, or review it on one of the review sites (I think the biggest ones are Class Central and Course Talk).

Courses I have taken (and reviewed):

https://henrikwarne.com/2015/10/20/coursera-course-review-so...

https://henrikwarne.com/2015/01/01/coursera-course-review-co...

https://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-cours...

https://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-cours...

https://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases...

https://www.class-central.com/mooc/4893/coursera-the-global-...

Review sites:

https://www.class-central.com/

https://www.coursetalk.com/

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I think this is a great effort. Are you at beginner level or advanced? My nephew is currently learning to code and the book he is using is very much university level content (read: utter garbage), it goes as far as distinguishing "inner loops". Any developer knows that there is nothing special about an inner loop (besides O(N^2)) - it's nothing more than logical progression. I'm looking for something worthwhile for him to learn from.

I've saved these reviews and will be contemplating them for his education - it would help to know how far along you were when approaching them.

Depending on how you structure your loops, things can be optimized on how it hits the cache and reads contiguous memory addresses.

There was a time (late 90s) when GCC would optimize conditionals in an asymmetric way. Somebody will hopefully correct me, but I think the advice was to make conditionals usually be true, for best performance. Since most coders would never hear about this asymmetry (though that's just my impression) it was a bizarre case of favoring one branch of a conditional over another for purely historical (machine code) reasons.

I think some optimizations are still possible based on likeliness of conditionals.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/109710/likely-unlikely-ma...

I think now branch prediction on processors can go either way, just as long as it's biased one way or another. If it's not biased one way or another, try to reduce out branches into vectorizable instructions (or pray that GCC takes care of it for you).

Branch prediction isn't a GCC thing, it's a processor thing.

Observe this wonderful Stack Overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processin...

I did an MSc in computer science, and after that I had worked as a professional programmer for about 20 years when I started taking the courses.

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