I'm so glad I've found this amazing course! Thank you!

Good practical use cases of Java have been given. The challenging quotient on some of the questions can be increased. For instance, the use of arrays to process CSV files, etc. But it was refreshing to do a Java course that didn't focus on the usual syntax and semantics but looked at real life examples.

Second week was a bit difficult to work with.

It was a good course overall, but I thought that the use of BlueJ was very ineffective as that "programming environment" made my progression through this course somewhat slower and more tedious. The constant re-compiling of code, creating a new object, and calling the method after each small change I made to my code did not feel very valuable for my learning. In addition, BlueJ constantly crashed when I was creating a new project or class. I also wish that I could actually program using Java consistently throughout the course rather than at the end of each week (after a series of videos). It felt like I was being bombarded with new syntax, semantics, and whatnot each week through the videos then asked to create/modify lots of different methods without enough practice beforehand.

This course is a huge disappointment. It is impossible to start the first assignment due to lack of information or examples of any kind. Many of the students have posted the same issue on the discussion forum and we are receiving no answers from mentors. This specific class is extremely frustrating and a huge waste of time. I am not the only one who thinks this!!!!! Someone should fix this class before they loose a lot of subscriptions because students are frustrated!!!!!

The course content was excellent. I highly recommend taking this class for anyone who wants to get a quick start in java or refresh it after a long time off. The exercises are wonderful at introducing basic problem solving skills by way of highly relevant real world examples.

If you are familiar with another programming language, especially a less demanding one like Python, this course will help you get used to the more rigorous requirements of Java syntax.

Now, why the two stars? Week 4 is fraught with errors. If you code the final project EXACTLY as asked in the assignment, using the EXACT definitions of all methods, the highest score you can get on the quiz is a 42. In other words, you must code and provide incorrect answers to pass the test. These mistakes have been pointed out repeatedly to moderators in the user forums for several years and no changes have been made to address the errors in the curriculum. Because this is a paid service, I find that highly unacceptable.

Though the course name includes java,it's more of a problem solving course using some functionalities form the edu.duke library designed to supplement the course.This course may not give you knowledge of java that much but it will surely improve your problem solving capability by introducing some interesting problems such as finding all genes from a DNA strand or making conclusions from large amount of data read from CSV files or converting an image to a gray-scale or inverted image.Nonetheless, for anyone interested to solve creative programming problems this is an absolute goldmine

I finished the course in relatively short time. It helped me pick up coding. The assignments were not too hard, though they definitely took me some time to finish it. I think the course is meant for people with some coding experience such as intro to Python, C/C++, not that suitable for completely new beginner.

I learned a lot in this course (as someone who had no experience in java at all)! At times it was a bit challenging which forced me to use additional time to complete the assignments, however overall this was an amazing course that help me grow my programming skills a lot!

Excellent explanations and amount of course work for practice, the tests made good use of the examples and work given, I am satisfied with what I learned in this course and see it's real world usage.

I really learn about clear concept of Java

Very difficult beginner course but possible with all the discussion forums and such but will require hours and hours of practice and time. Overall good course but time consuming and difficult for a beginner who is just starting out with programming. Not so bad for people with a few months or years of experience though which is why I'm giving 4/5 stars but would have given 2/5 stars from a beginner's perspective.

Very good course, my only recommendation is that the 'necessary' time to pass different tasks (especially readings) ought to be fixed. 4-8 hours a week is extremely inaccurate in my perspective, bearing in mind that i have close to 3 years of programming experience with C++ and C#, it took me at least 12-15 hours a week.

It would have been a 5 if the most of the links weren't broken!

the way practice assignments are written is very confusing and misleading at times. please improve on the writing style. it takes time to understand what the written instructions mean. its very difficult to complete assignments otherwise!

The instruction for the first week was quite basic and taught the learner little about how to actually write code in Java. However the assignments, which scarcely reflect the instruction, dive into code you were not taught how to write, and at a level well beyond any reasonable estimation of a true beginner. The assignment instructions are somewhat confusing and the necessary resources are scattered here and there. The first quiz reflected the homework, and so was likewise beyond anything that was actually taught. As well, its resources have to be gathered from here and there. The discussion board is rife with complaints echoing what I just wrote, as well as complaints about the basic course design and organization problems. These complaints are an ongoing issue, and stretch for almost a year back. Unless you are a fair hand at programming in a related language already, I would not sign up for this course.

The instructors were not around for help or commentary and the videos and lessons were sub-par.

Couldn't fiish the course. Not hard, but exhausting and not interesting.

This is a good Java Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBWX97e1E9g&list=PLE7E8B7F4856C9B19

I followed two videos and I'm learning in my way.

I left the course because the ammount of time required was too high. For example, for one part of an exercise I spent a total of 12 hours distributed in 3 days. For the other part of the exercise I spent 1 hour. Also, in the part one, the last exercise was tremendouly difficult for begginers and for someone (my case) that know one language.

You are making people hate Java. This is not for begginers. I have to say that the part of codepen and HTML was great.

Fortunatelly, I didn't pay. But I think that paying for this course is a waste of money. I had a good experience in other Coursera programming course: "An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python" of Rice Unviersity. The examples were awesome and the tests were reasonable, quite the opposite to this course.

Also, Eclipse is so much better than BlueJ in many ways, also into learning...

And there's more things that must be improved, but no time and no money.

I'm very dissapointed to this course and Duke Univeristy.

Use of Duke own specialised librarie ~ not the best way of learning progamming for the real world.

Very hard to follow, this is for medium level but not for beginners

Impossible to download anything from the resources website

This is all teached in Bluej which is tough to understand

Had to buy a SECOND JAVA book to get through this

Not for begginers! too hard!