Is Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course still the best machine learning course available?

It may not be the ‘best’ course but I can surely say it’s one of the best courses for people who want to get insight of Machine Learning. But yeah, it should be taken as a crash course and you should not compare the complexity of the course with any book. The course skips many proofs and derivations ,so it would be better if you follow a companion book (like books by Christopher Bishop or E. Alpaydin) which discusses those while taking the course. In this manner, you can gain a strong knowledge about the topic. You can also follow video lectures from other professors if you’re not satisfied with the explanation (e.g. I followed lectures of Abu Mostafa and Patrick Winston to get a detailed knowledge about SVM)

There are few topics that should have been included like KNN, Decision trees, Reinforcement learning etc. without which your introductory ML knowledge is incomplete. These topics you need to cover from books or other video lectures available on Youtube.

To conclude, the course may not be complete but it’s very well structured for beginners. There’s a reason behind being the most popular CS course on Coursera.

Answered by Saikat Dutta on Quora.com

Andrew Ng’s course should be the first step when getting into ML. Is it the best course? Not sure, but it is the best first course.

His course is developed in a way that anyone from any background can understand, develop and apply ML algorithms. They are explained in a easy and intuitive way.

Geoffrey Hinton’s course is another great one, but it is suited to engineers, mathematicians and statisticians.

Both are great courses, the one by Andrew Ng’s is explained in layman’s terms while Geoffrey Hinton’s is in more formal and professional. I first took Andrew’s course and when I next took Geoffrey’s I was still amazed as he added so much additional info but also was a bit complex with his reference to all major papers published on ML and the mathematical/statistical proof behind them.

Another major thing, Andrew’s course is uplifting and he constantly encourages you. For someone who is trying to venture into the vast world of ML, that is motivating and helps you focused to complete it.

Answered by Anand MG on Quora.com