Ratings and Reviews for Applied Plotting, Charting & Data Representation in Python

In addition to giving practical guidance in plotting and charting, the professors also give a simple but comprehensive explanation of the structure and functioning of the matplotlib.pyplot module, even though it doesn't require you to understand the deeper structure when you use the function, it certainly doesn't hurt you for learning more, especially when you want to be an expert in this.

Good Course

Overall, it is a good course, however, the professor should be more specific about visualisation.

Great intro course!

This course is anbalagous to taking a creative writing course, but all lessons are on vocabulary and grammar. Once again the lectures are unhelpful. The discussion forum in this course does not provide much help (unlike the first course in the sequence). I suppose they are applying the graduate school mentality to teaching: you want to learn it, figure it out. I myself am definitely not at that level right now. The assignments are challenging, and you will learn from them, but you won't learn deeply. It seems all very superficial. Just look things up to get them done. Type in any question you have and a solution will certainly appear on SO. Why not give students the tools necessary to solve challenging problems on their own (like in Python for Everybody and Python 3 Programming)? Professor Brooks is clearly passionate about programming and is very accomplished/intelligent. Unfortunately the teaching in this course is of low quality.

The course itself is great. For those complaining it's not detailed enough I think data scientists need to learn how to search for code and adapt it for their own purposes. If it's too hard to achieve in this course, probably start from a easier course or this is not the right career for you. However the grading system is broken. Cheaters just submit empty/irrelevant answers and trying to get 3 other people to give them good score on those empty answers. All the 3 reviews I've done for assignment 4 are such cases.

Good course, I liked the final assignment which gives the opportunity to freely explore data.

Some good pointers in matplotlib, covers quite a lot but goes over a range of features and tools that you can come back to. Assignments were a bit simplistic/easy

Too little of expounding and too much of searching the net by oneself. Too few examples. It is a self-learning but what's the Course for then? Plus the assignments. I didn't like the peer evaluation idea, just as evaluating the others, because I don't have time for this and that's not what I came for. First - what's the motivation of random viewers to fairly and thoroughly evaluate my work? Plus it's hard to finish the course quicker for this reason, because one has to wait a couple of days to get a grade. That's the reason I resigned from waiting for the assignments evaluations for next weeks assignments and in consequence for the certificate.

CONTENT: The instructor shows some examples of different plots in python (e.g. line, bar, scatter) and some concepts (e.g. histograms or heat maps) but doesn't properly explain anything. Mostly you'll get an example graph with snippets of code only working for that particular example and for the assignment you're "strongly encouraged to use other sources". That's not what you're supposed to get when you're paying for an online course. You should get proper explanations. ASSIGNMENTS: You're basically told to get data from any source you like and then plot some graphs. If you've had some experience with python and got your explanations for plotting from somewhere else, you'll mostly spend more time looking for data to present than for the actual assignment. I don't understand why there's no selection of graphs and data sets to choose from so you can concentrate on programming and properly presenting data rather than wasting your time looking at reddit like recommended by the instructor. ASSIGNMENT GRADING: You’ll have to grade your peers’ assignments with a rubric that’s just not working: you can give points for someone uploading an image/writing a paragraph of text, but you have to either give 0 or 100%, so there’s not way to properly grade partially wrong answers. Example: yes, there is an uploaded image and the student has explained how it follows “Cairo’s principle of beauty”, but it doesn’t follow the principle of beauty. So, how to grade: zero or hundred percent? Likewise, your assignments are graded by your peers, so you’ll usually have at least one or two days to add to each assignment. You should take this into account when opting for the monthly subscription. Additionally, neither you nor your peers are qualified to grade the assignments, because you’re just learning how to curate and present data (if you’re not already a scientist and just want to learn how to do this in Python). DISCUSSION FORUMS: You won’t find answers or discussions in the discussion forum. There are only posts asking to please grade a student’s assignment because it is urgent because the subscription is ending soon (see above). SUMMARY: If you need the certificate for Applied Data Science in Python, you probably must take this course. Otherwise I strongly encourage you to skip it and find other (better) resources to learn plotting in Python.