Ratings and Reviews for Using Python to Access Web Data

Finished this course because of Dr Chuck!!!

This is an awesome starter course for Python. It teaches how to parse xml, html and json. It teaches loops and recursive programs using functions. This course is encouraging and keeps you going. Dr. Chuck is a great speaker and teacher. The interviews with the founding fathers of todays programming languages and the internet as a joy to watch. The office hous videos make you feel like your a member of team.

Course well organized and engaging.

Nice

Love this course. Been very informative and encouraging.

When I was about to start this course after the introductory ones, I was a little upset by the reviews I spotted. The average rate of this course is high, yet the "most useful" reviews are negative. Maybe because of this, my own opinion about the course is "well above expectations". I will try to address most common points of criticism from other reviews, and hope this helps future students to make a decision. First, it has been claimed that the difficulty of this course is so much higher than in the previous two courses of specialization. I would not say so. Surely, it is more difficult, since it is expected that the students progress as they learn, but I have not felt that the material was enormously sophisticated. Also, the "entertainment" pieces have made a good deal of pushing the brain to relax. Then, it has been argued that the stuff in the forums is not polite and does not want to help, mainly making fun of the students. To tell the truth, I have not used forums much. I have asked one question and looked at about 20 most recent conversations at random. I have to say that I noticed noting rude in the stuff replies. In contrast to many other courses I have attended, the forum is alive, which is great! I have received a polite and comprehensive answer to my question in just about 4 hours, amazing! One thing is that the stuff is extremely attentive wiping out the code of the assignments and preventing discussions spoiling correct quiz answers. This may seem "rude" to somebody loving to have the assignments partially disclosed in the forums - but guys, we are not for cheating here. Finally, I will cite some reviews. "Some assignments basically require you to have previous programming experience"; "If you're a professional looking to learn Python for the first time, you're better off buying a book that provides the answer to an exercise with step-by-step rationale for the process"; "There was not a single assignment that I did not have to rely on reading tons of extra info from Overstack or other coding sites.". "The explanations are lacking and I'm left super confused." I would say - nothing personal, everybody has its own opinion, and impressions can be different. But these seem incorrect _to me_. Yes, this course does require some prior programming skills - but this is course 3 in the specialization, and previous courses are intended to get the required experience. As for the book - I cannot imagine number of pages (guess would be thousands) to cover every bit of access to each type of web data step by step from scratch. The same about lack of details. Come on, you cannot expect learning, say, XML at the level sufficient to apply for a job after 30-60 minutes of lectures! This is enough to give an impression and possibly guide the students in future courses choice, but not to start as a professional programmer. Moreover, I am not sure I will need to parse json a lot, and I would be unhappy to have a separate course on this. Yet, it is good to know that such thing exist not to be confused facing it, and the lectures in this course are perfectly suitable. As for the assignments being poorly related to the in-class material... Well, I would say I have been upset by the _presence_ of too detailed "working examples" preceding the assignments! I ended up with making my assignment first and then watching the example to possibly find some drawbacks in my work. And I have never used anything besides the examples provided in the textbook and python documentation to pass the assignments. Ok, I feel that I have written too much already. The last point is about the amount of assignments. During the previous courses it seemed to me that there could be more of programming tasks - 1 or 2 per week is not enough to cover, say, lists, which is essential to whatever you use Python in future. (On the other hand, since we have learned the basics, a lot of calculus tasks are available to us for practice on our own) Well, as for _this_ course, I feel that the assignments are just fine. I cannot claim that I can solve some arbitrary json or xml issue - but if I need, I have gained proper basement to learn the necessary details and features and to understand tutorials. Hope this helps future students whether they enroll in this course or no.

Good

Amazing course, I learned lots of knowledge to help me improve. And enhance my brain.

The course is as great as before. But the codes need to be explained more carefully and could introduce more details about the web data.

It's Awesome!