A Coursera specialization from the University of Alberta covering reinforcement learning, taught by Martha White and Adam White, with a sequence of courses on RL fundamentals and algorithms. Commenters describe it as following the Sutton and Barto material with quizzes and assignments.

Commenters call it a very good set of RL courses and say it closely follows the Sutton and Barto book with quizzes and assignments, unlike pure video courses.

What commenters said (4)

1. Strongly recommendsmark_l_watson2025in “Sutton and Barto book implementation”

   I want to add a second comment:

   Professors White & White (a husband and wife team) have a very good set of courses on RL on Coursera:

   https://www.coursera.org/specializations/reinforcement-learn...

2. Recommendsdlevine2024in “Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2018)”

   I did the Reinforcement learning specialization on Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/specializations/reinforcement-learn...), which used this book. The specialization was great, but I would say that I had a lot of trouble following this book. I would find that there was a concept I didn't quite get, and then other things would build on top of that concept. I ended up feeling like I didn't quite grasp everything, even though I read most of the chapters more than once.

   I do feel like there are a lot of things that aren't fully explained in this book, and maybe it is expected that the reader has some prior knowledge that I didn't have. For example, they never really explain the basic notation for backup diagrams. They just show one and mention that they are a thing. The mathematical notation they use also isn't really explained - they just start showing formulas of increasing complexity. It's possible to look these things up elsewhere, but they probably could have spent just a little bit more time explaining some of the basics and made it easier to follow.

3. Recommendsrg1112022in “Show HN: Fast Deep Reinforcement Learning Course”

   Nice resource, but still 10+ hours of video and nothing else.

   No code, coding assignments, math problems or coding problems.

   Very little RoI.

   I watched them all from start to finish. I had a superficial, shallow "understanding" but no real knowledge.

   The best (very short book) to learn Deep RL is the one by Zai, Brown from Manning.

   And keep the classic Sutton, Barto near. That's it.

   If you want a video course that closely follows the book with quizzes and assignments, check out UofAlberta's MOOC on Coursera.

   (Hugging Face also has a new Deep RL course taught by Simonini. You could check that out, but I haven’t seen it.)

4. Recommendswoah2020in “Ask HN: Without a background in CS, how do I get into the field of A.I?”

   Reinforcement learning. There's also a great course on Coursera for that, from the university of Alberta.

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