I can't judge the coursera course, but for anyone who is interested in this field and wants a gentle introduction, I high recommend <i>Programming Collective Intelligence</i> (<a href="http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do" rel="nofollow">http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do</a>). It covers many of the types of recommender systems that the coursera course is likely to cover, and comes with a lot of nice Python code examples.<p>It's highly useful knowledge too. I ran across so many startups that needed recommender systems that I launched a company called Algorithmic.ly (<a href="http://algorithmic.ly" rel="nofollow">http://algorithmic.ly</a>) to help companies without the expertise integrate recommendation systems and other types of algorithms into their projects.
I'd be interested in knowing how much deep learning is changing the algorithms used in this field, given the performance of restricted boltzmann machines on the netflix data set <a href="http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hinton/absps/netflixICML.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hinton/absps/netflixICML.pdf</a>.
If you want a quick start without taking a class, install the Apache Mahout project - one of the Hadoop map-reduce examples is a recommendation system. You can hack away, and run on Elastic MapReduce if you need to scale. (<a href="https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Recommender+Documentation" rel="nofollow">https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Recommend...</a>)
Interesting anecdote: A graduate of my university works for Google who originally had a very complex "machine learning pipeline" for the product recommendations but he has since re-implemented the feature in, as he calls it, a "much simpler bloom filter algorithm".
Hmm, seems interesting = I'm currently doing the Machine Learning one also via Coursera, run by Andrew Ng, and it's good gentle introduction to the subject.<p>It's a shame we can't view the course content for this one earlier...haha.
I'll drop a link to my (non-free) e-book:
<a href="http://arek-paterek.com/book/" rel="nofollow">http://arek-paterek.com/book/</a>