I started loving Coursera since "Machine learning" by Andrew Ng and what amazed me most was his ability to explain complex mathematical concepts in really simple words, with clean, readable hand-drawn diagrams and drawings. I'm really missing this in the Cryptography course. This course is quite difficult to understand and follow. Even if you have background in probability, the lectures explain a little of the underlying concepts and most of the lecture is essentially reading formulas and definitions from the slides. Even the presentation is unreadable - the formulas on slides aren't actual mathematical formulas but formula-like text typed in PowerPoint without any mathematical symbols or typography (lower or upper indexes, fractions etc). For example, the Bayes law is presented in the course as rather cryptic string "Pr[A|B]=Pr[B|A]*Pr[A]/Pr[B]" and here's its original, clean and readable formula for comparison https://goo.gl/P8Cvu2 This gets even worse when it's being substituted into a multi-line equations, which - guess what - are simple PowerPoint text either.

Prof. Katz is an excellent teacher and has created excellent material for the course. He explains every lesson in the course in great detail and the quizzes are sufficiently challenging to validate what you've learnt from the lesson.

Course is tense and loaded with information. It would be better if there are more information on PPTs. also if the numerical examples have more illustrations and more of themselves on any other additional material.

I am now genuinely excited about cryptography. It is a huge field, but this is an excellent introduction. Having watching enough DefCon and Hak5, I know that a good number of 'professionals' in the industry are lacking the fundamentals. This course is the fundamentals. Dr. Katz is renown in the field, and obviously has a passion for the topic. I have also been re-inspired to 'make math my own.'

An enjoyable trip through the history of crypto schemes, and practical attacks against them. By the end of this class you will have a good basic understanding of modern cryptography and real world implementations used online everyday. It's designed in a balanced way so that both those with a Mathematics background and those with programming backgrounds can both keep up.

A very informative and easily understandable course! I always fancied math, but never really got deep into it, so some of the primitives discussed here were new to me, but even so I was able to easily understand them thanks to Prof. Katz! And of course it was super exciting to find out in which way are modern secure connections secure. 10/10 would pass again.

The course is a short but sufficient introduction to the fundamentals of cryptographic primitives and protocols. It requires only a very basic level of discrete mathematics (first-course on DM is sufficient). The programming assignments are also very insightful and Katz gives enjoyable lectures on best practices in using crypto primitives.

I am very fond of the way the course material was presented. I found the definitions and proofs to be rigorous and intuitive at the same time, which is of great importance when learning such material. The accompanying textbook is great, too. Although I was already familiar with parts of the material, I thoroughly enjoyed the course.

One of the best course I have taken even though it was most challenging courses I have completed in Coursera. Thanks to Dr. Katz for his vast in depth knowledge and trying to simplify the best possible way. Worth time spending. Thank you.

Cryptography is one of the areas that most developers know just enough of to be really dangerous. Reverse-engineering and debugging code I have seen way to many examples to list here of home-baked attempts at cryptography.

Enjoyed the course throughly, but I feel that I got a bit lost when studying the formal definitions of the various encryption schemes mentioned in the course. The programming assignments were helpful and challenging.

Such a brilliant course, I had a basic idea of cryptography but didn't know a lot. Taking this course put on the map a lot of things I knew already and definitely helped me learn so much more. Absolutely loved it.

Lots of notational math but a great course to get into the meat of cryptography and understand the foundation of this most important topic.

Underneath that Professor facade, I suspect he's a wild and crazy guy :-)

Very interesting course. I would like programming assignments to be mandatory, not optional. Or at least there should be a way to get some information that the assignment is passed on Coursera page.

Excellent course. The proofs that are laid out in a way that made it easy for me to follow along, and it gave me a good overview of the areas of cryptography that are most relevant to me.

Wonderful and well organized course, it is really recommended to take it for those who are interested, which will definitely provide you with really understanding of cryptography!

The professor is excellent. He covers a lot of subjects using good analogies without loosing depth. There are programming assignments to help you grasp the material.

I really enjoyed passing this amazing course. Prof Katz explained concepts in a clear way . I hope there will be advanced cryptography courses on the coursera too.

Excellent course!

The course has a very nice structure, the classes are amazing and the professor have a lot of experience and domain of the subject.

Recommended!

I love the course material and the professor's way of teaching. This course is very detailed and one of the hardest course I ever took on Coursera.

Very useful insight about Cryptography, very good practical assignments. I advise it to everyone interested in Cyber Security. Very stimulating.

This is a really good course to get a high level overview of cryptography, the main elements and concepts, and the teacher is really didactic

I felt it was a good introduction to cryptography. There were quizzes and programming assignments throughout the course to assess knowledge.

Thanks to Coursera for that I have studied online this course! Also, thanks to

University of Maryland and to my Professor

Jonathan Katz.

The course was insightful and very useful. and i would thank DR.Jonathan Katz

I've learned a lot & really improved my skills