Absolutely not for beginners

bluej is not good enough,

its good with good quizes

Week 2 needs to be fixed.

Tq forn this certificate

The course was good .

It is a good course.

nice expericence

very good

good one

Too hard

This course made me want to stop coding. I've done other courses on Coursera and have learned so much, but in this specialization, I find myself dreading every single week of "learning" and assignments. Its not Java itself that's making it bad, its the way Duke teaches:

First, the course says that no previous Java knowledge is necessary, though from Week 1, that is clearly not the case. They literally didn't teach me the proper syntax to get started. I have to buy "Mastering Java" from Amazon to get base level knowledge. Second, about 25% of Duke's weekly assignments is stuff they haven't gone over. Its fine to struggle, that's a part of learning, but the jump from what's been covered in the lesson to what the final task of the weekly assignment goes over is frustrating to say the least. Programming languages give no mercy for syntax errors, so when you haven't learned the syntax for something you've assigned, its gets painful very quickly and there's no way out because the original assignment/request was so random to begin with that you're not sure what the final output should be, therefore you can't figure it out on your own. Lastly, their estimated time it takes to complete an assignment is WAY off. I've done plenty of courses on Coursera and they usually overestimate how long assignments take. Duke drastically underestimates it. Every week's assignment supposedly takes 10 minutes. I know what I'm doing and every assignment takes at least 1-1.5 hrs because of all the random stuff they want me to do.

I hoped Duke's nonsense stopped after the Javascript course (yes, they assigned Javascript in their Java specialization. Should've been the first red flag). For my sanity's sake, I'm withdrawing from this course and will avoid any course led by Duke University.

So far I am fairly disappointed with this course, it spends too much time on such simple concepts and skips over the really important ones. I was hoping for more of a 'university' level quality class, and instead I find myself listing to the instructors talk about subjects that are hardly related to what the quiz and lab work content will be, and when the time comes to work on the lab and quiz portions of the class, I find myself not knowing what they are asking and having to do my own research to try to figure out the answers as opposed to feeling that I at least was 'taught' the material in preparation for the quiz or lab.

Video instructors are knowledgeable, and I like the challenge of the assignments. But I recently got stuck on an assignment and went to the discussion forum for help. No response from any of the moderators or peers. Plus the codesnippet tool to post code to the forum is absolute crap. Will not format any code even if it is written in line by line. I have been fruitless trying to search for help outside of this course so far as well.

Lots of wasted time.

I really want to finish the class, but I doubt I will ever waste my money on these Duke\Java classes again. I will go elsewhere.

I completed the course. However, without my husband's help (who is a senior software engineer), I'm sure that I could have not. This course is surely not for a beginner. Though I had taken a C++ course in a community college before, I still found this course is so hard. Each lesson seems short, simple and easy to understand, but the assignments (Reading and quizzes) are crazy with very little reference document and clear instruction. Most of the time, I spent around 5 hours for each such assignment, not 10 minutes as it is allocated.

The lecturers go in to loads of depth, which is great. Instead of having smaller assignments though, I think there were 2 quizzes so far for me and then an assignment testing every single thing so far. When you're learning, you need to be able to chew away at it gradually and not have everything lumped on you in one go. It definitely is not for beginners. The concepts alone are at beginner level, but you will need prior coding experience to be able to follow it properly.

I would not class this as a beginner course. The content is too advanced if you are new to coding. I wish I had read the reviews before enrolling. This is course 2 in one specialism and course 1 in another within Coursera which does not seem right. I think a course 2 is the right level but the speed needs to be adjusted. I also think some of the exercise timings are off as they were indicating 15 minutes where the actual work takes a lot longer.

The course is good to learn how to solve problems with programming. The course instructors are also very good and understandable. But to learn java specifically, I wouldn't suggest this course to anyone because this course is totally based on the user defined functions that are provided by Duke University. And can't be used in other IDEs than BlueJ. So, it's more like learning how to use their functions than learning actual Java library.

I wished we had spent more time learning about more basic walk through the project such as attributes, methods and constructors themselves and the reason why we used them. Also clarifying more the object oriented method but instead I feel like the curse assumed we already knew what they were doing and focused more on solving the problem teaching easier stuffed like and, or, while and for.

Could not get through the first week. Way too much emphasis on BlueJ and Duke University specific libraries. I I already have a decent foundation in coding and took the course with the idea I could get a refresher on Java. If your a beginner there are way better courses out there. This course is all over the place and I could see it being confusing for someone just picking up programming.

Very hard. Not much help and poor explanation. Every professor uses their own little tricks and methods so the material does not flow well together. It seems like they assume that you remember every single concept from the start and don't give any useful tips on how to proceed about the learning experiences. This ended up taking way more time than it said on the schedule.

In an online course you cannot expect us to learn only by the practise without a little of theory. In the assigments you incorporated things we didn't know and you explained a few there but it is not enough. Here we don't have a regular following like in a real course so we have to learn everything by the theory and only put in practise that we learnt there.

The data set in the genome studies was too large for mine - and judging by the forums - others computers memory to compile. Which made some of the exercises/tests very difficult to complete. Also, a few of the tests seemed to have at best unclear questions and at worst plain wrong. &-:

Make to solve the problem with their own in-built modules which makes the creativity of learner limited to some fixed logic's rather than just letting them to develop logic's freely through any kind of java compiler.

I actually enrolled for this course with a intension to learn java programming from the basis.But i dont get the concept of class,interface,oop etc.this course help me to write the simple program.