4/5

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W

I really enjoyed the first two courses of Dr. Chuck's Python for Everybody Specialization -- but not this one. As some other reviewers have already stated I, too, felt increasingly frustrated and somehow left alone during this course. Most of this course's assignments were way too difficult and I had to search the web for hours to find some help to solve them. Or, quite honestly, I had to cheat my way through them, because I just didn't know what to do anymore. There are of course the discussion forums where one can state one's problem - but although the staff and mentors are really quick with replying (thumbs up for that), their tips are often way too general and not helpful at all.

After taking this third course I will definitely not continue with the Specialization, as I originally planned to, simply because in comparison to the first two courses, this third course is way too difficult and frustrating!

Also, in my opinion, Dr Chuck tries to squeeze in far too many different topics and different programming langauges into this course, instead of really just focusing on Python itself.

I completed this course, yes, but it left me with a very frustrated and unsatisfied feeling. I don't think I was really able to learn a lot from it, which is really a pity, since I enjoyed the first two courses so much.

I'm giving 3 star because I compare this course to Python for everybody and data structure which are perfect courses. The first reason that I'm not happy with this course is that you can never get the course finished because you have to wait for your first assignment reviewed by students and I saw in Forum that some people are waiting for 1 year! I guess thousands of students are waiting to get their homeworks reviewed. The assignment is taking screenshot from your python installed and printing something! This is the third course and who got this far for sure has python installed, Is the assignment really that necessary?!

Another reason is the lectures are in python 2 and for the assignments if you are going to work with python 3 (which by the way they recommend students use it rather than python 2 in the first course), is going to be pain. There are really different and its confusing and frustrating to figure out the codes that work with your python version.

I also think the lectures somehow got really complicated and difficult very fast in this course. However, I have to be fair and admit that I didn't know anything about xlm, html and json before taking this course and now at least I know what they are!

This module is where the Python for Everybody specialization kind of goes off the rails. It starts off good with RegEx, and probably could have dedicated another week to it, as I found it really interesting. Once it gets into networks and sockets, it's still interesting, but it starts to become less about Python and more about broader, big picture stuff. But there is still a lot of coding involved, and the lectures are very good.

However, by the end of the module, the assignments become less about coding and more about the big picture things that the code can do. The assignments become more about copy-pasting the already written code and tweaking one or two things about it than actually writing code an learning python.

The instructor is obviously very knowledgeable and the lectures are easy to follow along with. But by the end of this module the material offered up is just too broad, and there's not a lot to do in the assignments.

I only rated courses in the py4e specialization with 5/5 so far, but I'm gonna be honest, this wasn't good. The average student that takes this specialization is not nearly prepared enough to start using Python for accessing web data as they only wrote several programs containing 30 lines of code each. And this showed when the teacher couldn't even give any interesting and challenging 'home exercises' , because he knew the topic was covered at a very,very superficial level and the students are complete beginners.

The third course of the specialization should have pushed students into deeper and deeper procedural Python, by building on the first 2 courses until they could make a few small projects by themselves, then go into OOP, make a few object oriented projects, and only then get into web and databases. As always, see you in the next course.

The prior courses in this specialization are great, however be aware that around week 4 of this course I believe its Assignment 2 using the url to spider links it becomes problematic, and the reason for this is that the outline given to you to solve the problem by the auto-grader is wrong you will waste hours scratching your head as to why your not coming up with the correct sequence.It is only when you go to the forum that you will find out what the correct steps are that your code should follow. Along with working with URLs this course introduces google API Twitter API,XML and json towards the end. My only nitpick with this is that your given one-two assignments with these concepts but there is no assignments to explore and utilize other data on the web its pretty much up to the individual own initiative

The course is good, but the XML task is inadequately complex. The video tutorials do not provide a single analysis of a program that would request data by URL and process it. A template is offered to help, in which there are a lot of incomprehensible blocks, which are explained only in the next topic. If you enter a link from the task in the specified code, it gives an error. Spent a lot of time to get at least a remote idea of how this code works. By some miracle, I threw out everything unnecessary from it and got the values, the sum of which needs to be calculated. In general, he himself did not understand how he completed this task, but he was already ready to quit the course.

In general, I liked this and other courses of the teacher, but something needs to be done with the XML assignment

This is a great course with a fantastic instructor. However, the teaching staff was extremely condescending and impatient. Apparently she expected all of us to do the assignments in the same way, and if a student used a different method and got stuck, she would just tell them to switch to the one method she suggested and provide no helpful feedback on their questions at all. For the assignment in week 5, she posted a step-by-step guide and then replied to almost all questions in the discussion board by telling people to reread the guide or even delete everything & start over to just use her method. As the TA for a beginner's class, she is very discouraging for people who just started learning coding. She definitely made the learning experience a lot worse than it needed to be.

Thanks for the wonderful course. I truly had a great opportunity to learn from a Professor from MIT by sitting in India. The lectures were beautifully presented so that we do not have a feel of how time elapsed. However, compared to the previous 2 courses, this one is a little bit tough to learn. The explanations and slides changing are too fast that it was very difficult to grasp the concept. The Twitter API example and corresponding videos could be avoided since it requires a lots of stuff from the Professors library. Overall, the number of videos in Week 6 could be reduced. Please bring the flow of clarity like in Course 1 and Course 2 in Course 3 also. If possible, please upload a copy of the PPTs at course website.

Graders/TAs are not very helpful, and condescending at times, which takes a lot away from the learning experience. This didn't only happen to me, but to others as well. I ran into these incidents while going through the different forum postings looking for answers to my questions. Also, I wish more robust programs would be added to the lectures and have the teacher explain them, so that the students can gain more supervised experience with more complex assignments. Other than that, the professor is a great lecturer, always has a simple way of explaining CS concepts and make his lectures easy to follow. One last thing, please improve on the assignments description - the objective is not always clear.

I enjoyed this course, and the learning materials and instructor is great, but I felt that quite a bit that was covered (like the Twitter URL and API) required me to accept a number of principles/code that seemed to be a lot more complex than my beginner level could really engage with. When the assignments came we were given sample code that was 80-90% usable in our assignments. I did not feel like I was learning as much when I did not have to write my own code but just changed one or two lines...I also did not feel comfortable to attempt my own version as there were so much (given) code that I understood the reasons for but not really how to use it differently myself.

The course itself is fine. However, if you want to get the most out of it I recommend to take some courses in web page and network design before taking this course. The assignments are pretty much consist of pre-made programs provided by the instructors and students adjust them slightly to pull data from the web and then adding few line of codes from two previous courses in the specialization to loop and iterate to calculate some numbers.If the pre-made programs are not provided I don't think that you are able to write the program from scratch by yourself if you don't have beforehand knowledge and understanding web design

3/5, great professor lectures and good textbook, but the class is structured in such a way as to rush us through every new concept without lingering to practice or revisit material, and the assignments seemed to be very difficult in comparison to the previous classes. This is especially the case after introducing us to BeautifulSoup -- the difficulty of the assignments ramps up very quickly for people with no programming experience. This class has a fun professor and decent reading material but it may take studying elsewhere to complement your grasp of concepts when completing the class's assignments.

I liked this course and I am liking the specialization a lot. But I noticed the quality of the courses decreasing. The first courses were perfectly explained and worked and I know what was everything.

In this course there is a lot unsaid, a lot of things in the code that are not explained. And it goes very fast. I understand that at this point the professor might expect us to look at documentation, but he does not explain how that documentation is organized nor where it is. And the documentation is NOT easy reading.

I wish there were some more explanations and more exercises like in the first courses.

I think that this course, in comparison to the previous ones is considerably more difficult. One has to link all that was learned previously in python to these new exercises and I feel like there is a lot of information given in a short time. Also, the assignments are considerably more difficult than the examples provided during the lectures. I think the course would benefit from some additional assignments as well as either additional lectures or directions to further reading and exercises that would facilitate the understanding of the concepts related to using python for accessing web data.

I continue to like these courses, although I spent way too much time on the assignments. I also think the assignments are poor in terms of teaching. I actually do not know, if my programs were good or not. I just know, I muddled myself through to reach the correct results.The grading of this course was not working properly. I had problems grading my colleagues, and was therefore not getting credit at the time I actually finished it.Coursera has to improve, so such frustrating things do not diminish the actual pleasure and benefit of learning over this platform do not diminish sharply.

This course was great in terms of learning the most practical things, but was a bit lacking in fully explaining all the code. In real situations, I don't expect to have sample code handed to me and in that case I believe that having keywords and imported formats be explained better, at least when we are looking at the code. I had to consult my mate who is knowledgeable in those fields but otherwise I could do all the bits needed by myself. The beautifulsoup chapter was especially frustrating as the documentation for the format is awful and I'm told it's not very common to begin with.

After taking previous two courses I think everything is going on well and being organized we. But from this course the difficulty increases extremely. I did not have any problem to do assignments in course 1 and 2, but in this course 3 I have to post questions on the forum because I cannot even understand the assignment question, or search even basic concepts on Google. Maybe the teaching staff want us to do assignments independently and they only answer part of my questions on the forum. But as I have problems in doing assignments, I hope they could give me clear explanations.

The codes are too hard. Maybe this course will benefit from being a whole specialization for full comprehension of the libraries used, such as urllib or BeautifulSoup. The XML task was really hard, especially because of the Geographical code. If anyone sees this, before taking this course, I strongly sugest taking other basic python courses, and if you have taken other python courses; I suggest you to do week 5 and inmediatly week 6, to understand the week 5 task. Other than that, the teacher is great, and other tasks are kinda easy.

Course had pretty good basic information for people not familiar with programming. I would like to have seen more in-depth tasks or project(s) that would require deeper exercise of the topics covered in class. Each assignment boiled down to parsing a file using specific method (reg ex, Beautiful Soup, XML, or json libraries) to do the same task. Requiring people for instance to build additional data types already taught (lists, dictionaries) would have been at least little more challenging.

Overall it is a good basic intro class.

Very difficult, this is not for beginners, should be intermediate.

They should consider make the course a bit longer so they could explain the topics with more patience and details. I, particularly, needed a lot more explanation about JSON and XML before those assignments.

The mentors of the forum could give more details to answer our doubts, after all, we are beginners!

Maybe a reminder should be repeated every lesson because it is a trouble in every assignment we make: attention to the Python version we are working!

I have enrolled in this course because, I´d like to improve my skills on web scraping, but I am disappointed. For those who already are familiar to Python, this course is too basic and do not teach anything new about web scraping. Some videos are repetitive and the bonuses are worthless.

I would rate it two stars, but I think I should have evaluated it better before enrolling. Considering it might be useful for beginners at Python, I rate it three stars, but it should have better videos, materials and evaluations.

The topic is an important one I feel but this course is way boring. Despite the instructor being a great teacher, I felt he was just reading slides without going on with a more detailed explanation. There is no engagement with the students other than the forums which are awful for providing good answers despite the fact that they answer fast. No in-video questions, the exercises are too ambiguous or too easy. At the end, I just wanted to finish, get my certificate, and continue with other courses than this one.