The first two weeks were fine. Week 3 was a struggle to get through. I couldn't figure out why all of a sudden we were dealing with APIs. The instructors did go through the material which was tested but I would appreciated an even slower pace. Compared to the previous 2 courses (in this Python3 specialization), Course 3 Week 3 was a grind and I just wanted it over and done with. As usual, the final project requires a lot of scanning around in the forums to figure out how to do things.

The final project allowed me to get a 100% grade even though i did not finish question #6. Over the past week there has been little to no response concerning questions about the course related to problems with the final project.

The final course work is hard to complete, not because it is a difficult assignment, but because:

1) The runestone is so buggy. It kept giving me errors when I completed one question. I copied the answer, opened the runestone in a different tab, pasted the same answer and then finally the answer was marked as correct. Same thing happened every stage of every question. It's difficult to answer questions when you can't see whats happening, and then there's the buggy software that just adds salt on the wound.

2) The "Cache" pages are fine and well written, but the questions are very confusing to understand for someone who is new to Python, let alone APIs. Videos to explain what the question means and a few examples of what the output should be like would be much appreciated.

Runestone project was buggy and added hours to work to complete

This course and the balance of courses 1-4 of the specialization were fantastic - I would highly recommend each. Course 5 (the capstone project) was an abomination. Basically zero instruction / guidance and very frustrating for anybody except decently experienced programmers. If courses 1-4 are your only exposure to Python, you could easily spend a month or more on this project. If getting the Specialization Certificate is very important to you, there are resources online that you can leverage to complete the project but that is done largely at the expense of any real learning, so I really hope UofM comes up with an alternative final project that is more consistent with the level of expertise attained in courses 1-5 (maybe something on implementing classic algorithms?).

Excellent course which teaches how to process request, extract and process Internet data in a simple and step by step approach. I have gained invaluable skills how to handle large data with Python

In itself, a good course. If you want to take this course, I recommend it. If you are, however, taking this entire specialization I suggest you walk away. The final course (course 5) is a course by someone who has not been lecturing in the course, presenting something they obviously are very fond of. The course work is, and I quote, "a project with minimal scaffolding. Expect to use the the discussion forums to gain insights! It’s not cheating to ask others for opinions or perspectives". In other words, part of the learning target is to work through bad or incomplete documentation and to solve an exercise that is stated without providing the information you need to solve it. Unless someone else already went through the moves, the lecturer fully expects you to fail by yourself.

If I wanted to feel the pain of learning without help or instructions, I would have just worked with the online manuals ... which is what this exercise openly tells you they want you to do. Its a shame for the other 4 courses, which are well done and have passionate lecturers.

I have recommendation this courses to several friends and colleagues, and will continue to do so. I have learned a lot from this course, as I did with the previous two. The quality of the presentation and material are of the highest standards.

I preferred to do the examples and exercises in a Python environment, instead of the Runestone text book. However, for Course 3, I ran into the following issues I could not overcome (as yet):

The requests_with_caching module get() function consistently gave the following error:

'TypeError: __init__() takes 1 positional argument but 3 were given'

in Python 3.6.3 with Spyder/Jupyter Notebook

2. Also, I could not get 'from requests_with_caching import get" to import in Python 3.6.3 with Jupyter Notebook.

Reading content is awesome. Videos are little bit boring. But it's okay when you get to learn so much.

Basically the video lecture was only good, but i think projects should be more challenging rather than to just run on runestone environment, The difficulty level of project should be increased in terms of a real project situation where in this course a user should be able to select his/her own api style given from a list, and moreover this course should encourage searching and tackling some real probelms.

They didn't even mentioned it to put on it to github. This project isn't that enough to be a part of git repo though.

But Overall this course is nice, just after completing the course, anyone should be able to try to think out of the box and do more out of it to prove the worth of your time spent in this course.Thank you.

I love the course part 1, and 2. they are understandable and following the textbook. However, from part3 to 5, I was disappointed with the gap between the courses.- they are unclear and less practice.

Not nearly enough practice and hence not worth the money. You learn how to code by practicing, not by watching others code...

This course is part 3 of a 5-course Specialization on Python 3. It is an excellent course. Courses 1 and 2 start at a very basic level but as the courses progress, the challenges improve and it gets actually quite interesting. The instructors have provided a valuable amount of exercises for us to practice. Prof. Resnick and his assistants are excellent instructors and you get bonus jokes at the end of each week, which I loved. Thank you all for creating this amazing specialization.

The University of Michigan Python specialization is the best series of Coursera courses that I've taken. The videos are high quality and informative, the Rhinestone online textbook is a great source for practical experience in writing code and the daily practice keeps up your recollection of earlier topics. Highly recommend

Very well organized instruction and materials. Content and skills are introduced incrementally allowing participant to develop practical skill in their use. In addition, there are practice and reinforcement learning opportunities to help you firmly root the skill in your memory. [Former public school teacher]

This course really helped me enhance my programming skills in Python. It teaches the more "Pythonic" way of coding. REST APIs are also very important and challenging, and this course guides you through that topic wonderfully. Definitely a must for those who love coding.

Awesome content and guidance with top of the line applications for application of knowledge acquired throughout the course. It covers the basics and then implements higher order topics over them.

This course provides a good intro to working with data and internet apis in the json format using python. Definitely feel confident in digging deeper with APIs on my own after taking this class.

Thanks a lot for this great course

I think it is a very nice course, well explained. My only issue is that they use a interface (Runestone) to do problems and exams. Although this interface is very nice to do exercises and practice, it is really bad when you have to do complex things. I also think that apart from the practics, which is a really nice tool, they should also teach us how to work in the real word using python from our computer and not through the lens of a custom-built interface.

There is some problems with the caching in the Final Project. I have to use https://fopp.umsi.education/runestone/assignments/doAssignment?assignment_id=24 instead https://fopp.umsi.education/assignments/doAssignment?assignment_id=24

The tool is TERRIBLE!!! To much bugs that waste tons of times!!!

Fine, then, except for the tool, everything else of the course is fine. But the course is DEFINITELY NOT for beginners. At lease take a basic python course before this one.

This would be much better if you could use an external IDE. The final project wasn't realistic because we were stuck using the Runestone code window which makes it very difficult to code as you would in a real job.

The course material was decent enough, but the final project had some glaring issues which could potentially be a time waster. For those taking the course, make sure you access the final project via Coursera, and not by clicking next on the Runestone textbook. It turns out these lead to 2 different links with the Runestone version being outdated. It took a lot of forum digging to find this out, and some have reported spending 7 days on this issue.

Claimed it is an intermediate course. However, it was rather a beginner one. For a beginner a good one. I did not understood how the traceroute and the whole routing part is related to Python API calls. I think that is out of topic.