How to upgrade coreutils from 8.21 to 8.24 in Linux Ubuntu 14.04?

I want to use the 'progress' status option with dd which is available with coreutils 8.24 up. Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) has coreutils 8.21 and the current (stable) release for coreutils is >8.24.

I wish to upgrade from 8.21 to 8.24 in the same system and after searching the Internet I have come to learn that I would most likely have to build the package from source. But living in Ubuntu for all the time in my short computing life, I have never build a package from source and have no idea how to. Also, I am not sure if upgrading coreutils without Ubuntu's "permission" would not cause a system crash through some dependency issues for other utilities.

Is it possible to upgrade coreutils without effecting my current Ubuntu system? Could someone point out the way by which it could be achieved?

You can download, compile and install coreutils into a user defined directory for non system use.

Running as root, I used the following commands to install version 8.27 to /root/coreutils

cd /root
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.27.tar.xz && tar xf coreutils-8.27.tar.xz
export FORCE_UNSAFE_CONFIGURE=1
cd /root/coreutils-8.27 && ./configure \
        --prefix=/root/coreutils            \
        --libexecdir=/root/coreutils/lib    \
        --enable-no-install-program=kill,uptime && make && make install

You can then run the command using the absolute path of the installed binaries.

 $ /root/coreutils/bin/dd

Update the wget url to use the version you desire. You can find coreutil releases here http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/