Udacity AI nano degree program vs Andrew NG's Deep learning

Udacity Artificial intelligence nano degree program vs Andrew NG's Deep learning course on Coursera? My expectation is solely to improve my skills in this domain and not looking in terms of placement assistance.

I have taken both courses, and the are both very good. I would recommend taking Andrew Ng's deep learning course first. It gives detailed knowledge of how deep learning works at the lowest levels. You learn, and write (in the assignments) the actual algorithms to build, train, and run neural networks based solely on the math equations. Andrew Ng is a great lecturer. He teaches every topic in a way that enables you to understand everything in each lecture, and every lecture builds consistently on the previous one. The assignments are well structured and lead you step by step to successful implementations, in small easy-to-understand increments. There is basically no pre-requisite for this class...anything you need to know is provided in the lectures. After taking this course, I felt like I understood how deep learning works, but I don't think it gives the higher level programming skills necessary to immediately translate that knowledge into solving real-world problems.

The Udacity course is taught at a much higher level, and the assignments are much more complex and open-ended, with little or no guidance to help you get to the right answer. I thought the lectures were a hodgepodge of topics, from many different presenters, with no clear master plan, and with inconsistent quality. You do, however, get access to real people to help when you are stuck. You solve real research problems in this course sequence, using python and tensorflow. And, you get to see and experiment with a good cross-section of different deep learning network architectures. You need to be well-skilled in python, pandas, numpy, etc to succeed, but the tensorflow stuff is taught as part of the course. This nanodegree foundation sequence was difficult and often very frustrating. However, at the end of the day, I feel like I emerged with the skills needed to be capable of really solving actual, real-world problems.

So, my very strong recommendation is to do both, starting with Andrew Ng's course and only then tackling the Udacity sequence. Good luck!

answered by David Calloway on quora.com