The highlight of this course for me was the interesting programs to write at the end of each week. The "low light" is that so many of the really interesting problems relied on using Duke's course specific wrapper classes that masked the true complexity of, for instance, writing to and reading from files or manipulating images. It's a bit sad that the most interesting code I wrote uses a package not available in standard Java. It would have been a bit more interesting to have ended the class actually knowing how to solve the courses problems without a crutch package. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the course and learned quite a bit.

The one docked star is for hiding all the interesting bits inside a course specific package.

I really enjoyed the coursework for this class. In particular, I loved how challenging some of the assignments were. However, I do hate that I cannot submit final quiz answers without paying for the course. I also did not like how little help there seemed to be offered to some individuals on the forum regarding issues they were facing with their code (specifically with the GeneFinder project).

I took three of the courses from Michigan on working with Python and they were completely open to complete without payment (which means you opt not to get a verified certificate). I wish that this course, and the specialization that it is part of, fell into the same category.

course is very good. i learn most of the things from this course also i get a strong knowledge from this course. i learn more basic concepts from this course. my concept building formulas also make more strong from this course.

After understanding how to think like a programmer and some foundation concepts you will start learning the Java language like the loops, functions, variables, creating class, and much more stuff as well as building some simple programs.

More than 200K students have joined this course to learn Java programming and you can also join this particular course for free but you need to pay for certification.

It is a very good course, with great examples and great instructions, except I think in the first week of the syllabus. There, the exercise questions were very tough compared to the examples given in the lectures. I was stuck in that area for a long time. Too long in fact. In the end I skipped the exercise and went ahead in the course, got a better idea of how stuff was supposed to work and then came back and attempted the 1st week's questions again. I checked the discussions forum too and found that I was not the only one with this problem. So if you guys could focus a bit more on explaining Week 1, that'd be great!

It's awesome course with wonderful instructors. i learned a lot about java basics here and became more confident to take it to the next step. However as every thing can't be 100% perfect the course has some drawbacks IMHO, such as the quizzes that sometimes annoying to do but it's okay. what's not okay is the IDE bluej. this thing is just the worst. i can understand that the instructors want to train the students to write the code and debug it from scratch but it's just a pure agony.

overall, it's awesome if you have experience in other programming languages but if not stay away for your own sake :D.

There are some errors in the week 2 programming assignment - particularly where it asks for Strings where it really should say genes. I was able to figure this out, but it required rewriting a bunch of code. This is a minor irritation.

What is far worse is the amount of cheating going on in the discussion forums. Multiple students are posting all of the answers to the quizzes, and little to no moderation of these posts takes place. I have flagged them when I see them and no action is being taken. This is really disgraceful in what is otherwise a very nice course.

It is a useful course that can guide you successfully through Java if you have minimal previous experience. Assignments are good and interesting and also educational. The environment used (BlueJ) is not making your life easier and probably will not be used for professional purposes. That also makes all these libraries built on this environment not useful. The jshell should be used as an introductory IDE and perhaps NetBeans should be also mentioned. I would rate with something more than 4 stars but definitely not 5.

I have taken quite a few Coursera courses with some higher level course but this course seems quite lengthy for me although the content is quite simple (maybe because I've learnt Java before and I took this course just to pick up my knowledge about Java again) and one thing I don't like about this course is the use of BlueJ (though it's not too difficult to use, I think it's quite impractical in real life). Overall, this course provide useful knowledge for beginners of Java with some very practical use cases.

I wish we did't have to use the packages custom made by Duke, and that some of the assignments were a bit more articulate in what they exactly expected of us, and probably change the time needed it would to take to finish them because it took so much more than the said duration. But otherwise this is an amazing course which made sure that you also went outside it to explore while making sure its interesting enough,which made it so that the course was at level higher than mentioned.

This course is fantastic in the sense that you get a lot of hands on experience with interesting projects that have real world uses. My only criticism is that sometimes they do not explain nuances of programming that beginners may struggle with; all of the information is there, but it may take some self guided exploration. If I were to tweak this course, I would add more reading sections that explicitly say all of the things covered in the video. Overall, very satisfied!

A very nice basic java course. The best parts are the instructors are really cool and explain topics easily. They best part was they literally made "Java Cookies " hahahaha;-). However some topics like classes, modifiers and constructors and stuff like that could have needed more explanation. For someone coming from a completely new background could have some amount of difficulty in learning the first few concepts.Otherwise really recommended.

Well-structured and informative course with very nice teaching staff. Although described as beginner-friendly, I would have found it very challenging without prior (basic) experience in programming. A little complaint would be also the organization of the material - it wasn't always clear to me what exactly should I look at/download from the associated course website. That being said, a solid and valuable intro to Java programming!

Pros: 1.It introduces Java concepts on appropriate level for beginners. 2. It introduces the concept of simple library and encourages us to consult documentation to learn more about it. 3. It focuses on solving problem rather than getting stuck in the syntax. Cons: 1. It doesn't provide course material. It would be perfect if slides with all summarized syntax and concepts are provided in cheat sheet form.

Good challenges, good emphasis on relevant knowledge, but unreasoned instructions: had to rely more on myself and make my own programming exercises between some lectures to get comfortable with new material before moving on, as well as alterate some methods for better reuse during the exercises provided.

You can learn well from here, but pay attention, and dont afraid to exercise coding when you feel to

Overall, this course was a decent introduction to Java and many related concepts. The only noticeable downside was the choice of development environment. The BlueJ environment is very lightweight, but fails to check for simple errors (e.g. use of == instead of .equals() for string comparison). It also lacks the convenience of auto-complete for variable names that almost all other free IDEs offer.

The course is great in content quality and quantity. The only reason i dont give it a 5 stars is because of the Bluejay environment used. It would be best if the environment of the course, was closer to what it is used in industry and real life. However if you already have some experience in java, you can work around and follow this program in a different IDE. Definitely recomended nevertheless

This is a great course but timing for coding assignments is not accurate.The are marked as 10 mins but could take hours to complete them.Other than that great course but in order to solve them the learner should have little bit of coding experience before the course.Overall a good course and recommended for those who needs a little challenge in their coding life.

Except for a few problems regarding the clearness of some of the homeworks' statements, hence the stars, this is an excellent beginner's course for anyone interested in Java. I am currently taking the follow up course "Java Programming: Arrays, Lists, and Structured Data" and for the moment it seems as good as this one, although with the same few problems.

Great course! One sugestão I have is to teaching how to use FileResource,URLResource, DirectoryResource, Pixel, ImageResource, etc, without using the edu.duke, because in the real word we don’t use this library. I know this library can facilitate the coding, but when the students use another IDE, they will not can do the same coding as they used on course.

Overall course was pretty good i really enjoyed doing assignments and answering quiz. I found coursera website a user friendly and easy to navigate

The thing i didn't like in the course was a BlueJ IDE, at beginning of the course i tried BlueJ and found that it is one of the weird java IDE i have ever used. So i completed all assignments using eclipse.

This course gives basic java programming tutorial on the most commonly used String and File with a general idea of using the java library by providing a handful of exercises. I like the entire programming exercise experience. The only complaint is it's sort of a hassle to use the BlueJ ide. I got used to it at Week3 but the course is nearly the end.

There are a few rough corners that could be ironed out. Answers in this course are not rounded they just cut off the extra decimal places without instructing you to do so for example. The estimated time for assignments if you're a begginer in programming is beyond optomistic. The video lectures themselves were excelent.

Good introduction to Java programming, instructor videos were informative and the quizzes and tests were challenging and interesting.I was familiar was the Java syntax before taking this course, I think a complete beginner might have to do a little bit of extra online research to clarify some concepts.

Good course for beginners with no prior knowledge of basics. Interesting assignments. However, they use the BlueJ environment to run the code and also use many custom created classes - easy to use but hide the basic functioning of the Java language and the structures that are supposed to come with it.

It was a little hard to get started because the documentation for the course (various websites, etc) isn't super clear (to me), but once I got used to it, it was great. The instructors are great and explain the concepts really clearly. The provided classes (DirectoryResource, etc) were awesome!