Underlying concepts are not explained very well and if at all they are mostly not linked to the methods these concepts are realized with. Sometimes there are logical breaks and it looks like different parts of the course have experienced different turns of revision so the course does not like 'made of one piece'. If there are different ways to solve a problem or get around with an assignment explanatory videos with a synopsis of these ways and their upsides and downsides would be nice.

The course is not beginner level at all; it requires the student to have prior knowledge starting from week 2. The course takes much time, and it covers a lot of topics which is a good thing. However, in my opinon, most of the topics covered are pretty advanced. Starting week 2, it is not all about pure JavaScript coding because you are required to use the Duke Learning Program Library of the Simple Image which should not be one of the core subjects of the course.

This course was a very mixed bag, the videos were boring sometimes and don't seem to convey programming concepts very well. The assignments were sometimes fun but took way longer than expected as it was hard to understand the basics from the lectures. Debugging in Duke's own environment was often a nightmare.

I've done one previous course teaching Python a long time ago but that one seemed to me to explain programming concepts in a much more understandable manner.

This is not a course for beginner. They teaching you how to use their custom libraries instead of fundamentals of java script. I learned javascript in my university 15 years ago and it wasn't that hard to learn that time. :). The instructors seems to be reading script except " Robert Duvall"

Robert Duvall teaching from experience and i like his explanation. I hope next course will be better than the first one.

I liked the course, but I think the videos were missing a little more information. Many of the projects included information not even covered in the videos and we had to figure it out on our own somehow. The course was difficult for me because I had ZERO knowledge of programming, so most of the time (like 80% of the time) I had to get help from the discussion forums. I give 5 stars to the forums tho!

I like the fact that course provides the foundation information but the support received is far from sufficient. Most of the time students are on their own. Don't expect to get your questions answered in forums timely. Your best friend is Google. Also the JS file that you would use for your assignment is not reachable and there is no way you could let Duke know about it and fix it. So a big bummer.

I will give it a 3* review as I really enjoyed and learned a lot in the HTML and CSS part (first 2 weeks), but the java script is really poorly covered. It is too hard and with no "translations" on what the hell is going on. The Duke University team is good and they obviously know what they are doing, but they need to review this course and make it more simpler... :)

The mini-projects in the course were fairly interesting as you get the opportunity to work with images which even as an experienced programmer is something you may rarely do. However, this course has no reason to be in a specialization on Java programming. Completing this course felt like somewhat of a waste of my time just to check it off for the specialization.

Beginning was very promissing but very fast the concepts became not understandable. Videos explain less and less but tasks become more and more complicated. In my opinion this course (and all Java specialization) is not ment for the beginners. This doesn't explain the most basic concepts a person that doesn't have IT background should start with.

A good course for introduction to concepts, the concepts are not very well flushed out in the lessons and leave the student having to search for other materials to learn the concept well enough to apply it. On the plus side that does help reinforce the material but the amount of time stated in the commitment brief is not correct for this course.

This course is quite useful for the beginners. It gives a quick review about web programming. Teaching of HTML and CSS is very informative but I faced some difficulty in learning Javascript. I suggest you to teach it using codepen as HTML and CSS instead of using Duke Learning Environment initially. For me it was not easy to switch to codepen.

This course was okay at best. The last two weeks focused too much on image functions and making. While I get that this can be a 'fun and practical' example, it became stale and annoying. It was more stressful than anything else. I really hope the future classes in the Specialization aren't designed in the same way. Variety is not a bad thing.

It is a good introduction into programming. The lessons are based on projects and is more practical than theoretical. This is also a problem and challenge for those who are complete beginners. I spent way more time in the course than the stipulated time. For those with zero knowledge, you had to rely on other resources to get you through it.

Several typos in the course threw me off, and there were some concepts and code I had to use that hadn't been directly covered and as someone who needs a strict curriculum I struggled understanding how certain parts of code worked. However I think that the video lesson were really good with explaining concepts without being convoluted.

This course was very comprehensive and helped me to understand JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and coding altogether. The only downside was that I felt as though the discussion forums were not at all helpful. I didn't get any help when it came to the Try it Yourself Assignments even though I posted my issues in the discussion forum often.

Good, but at times it goes into extensive detail about pretty easy concepts while breezing over more difficult ones without explaining things fully. As material gets harder, a teacher should think where the students mind might be, and make analogies to help them along. The course was somewhat lacking in this regard.

For the eager student maybe some more resources should have been shared. I was hoping to learn some production quality environment basics e.g. the ideal editor, best practices etc.

That said- I really liked how the 3 components, css, js and html were stitched together to help understand interactive webpages using js.

The use of Codepen to write code instead of a normal IDE was really confusing and the fact that the teacher doesn't write the code while explains it, instead, the full code appears out of nowhere. Despite that, the teachers are good, I just didn't found a purpose in putting this course in a java specialization.

Week 1 is very good and you feel like you will really understand all this! Week 2 and 3 are just very complicated and not for beginners at all! This course requires a lot of time investment outside the course hours - a lot of research and time. Javascrip should have been explained in a more detailed way.

thank u so mach for this course it was simple and pretty good for the first 2 weeks i really enjoyed it :) ; but the other two weeks though ... i had a hard time there , if you try to improve it , the js wasn't understandable at all or at least mention in the course info that js background needed !!

it started off as being for beginners but after a while it was rushed and made it extremely difficult for beginners to keep up. Please dont just tell the student to go and write the code for something without giving a hint. Also, there were math mistakes in the course material that are easy to fix.

Some Teachers did have good explaining power but some not. While This course was interesting for me. This course of html,css was not complete. Here the part of css was not described good.They were just focused on green screen effect and images. None of them Explained how to design the webpage.

Good course in theory, but there's no way to enforce students actually completing the assignments. I didn't feel challenged by the material, or encouraged to do the assignments. I knew enough about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from another course, that this course didn't teach me anything new.

I enjoyed week one a lot, but after that you need a fair amount Javascript knowledge to follow along. I decided to not complete the course as it was no longer worth my time at that point. If you do know Javascript you should be ok, if not I'd stay away from this class until you do.

Moderator answer in a very short time. I was impressed of that. I think the course should add a video to explain more in details some concept as variables. many of my issues were coming from deep doubts i had about this. maybe explain variables on hardware and variables as pointers.