Do not take this course.

The quizzes are fine. They can be a little obscure, but there are tools on the Internet like Stackoverflow for techniques and the Tryit Editor for testing things out without just handing you the answer. The video lessons are flawed - Coursera wasn't designed to handle code, so the text in the questions screws up any time it's indented too far, forcing you to scroll sideways to read every line. And the non-code questions are usually useless vocab or trivia.

But it's the end-of-chapter labs that make this unsalvageable. Google will ask you to do something, then give you nearly every line of code required to write it. If you try to do it a different way, or execute multiple steps at once, there's a good chance it won't work even if the output is exactly what they asked for.

This will continue until Week 7 when they want you to do something in Ubuntu using a program they provide for you, which you can't read. When your attempt fails, you cannot debug it because you can't read that program. Nor can you stop and try again later if you get stuck because your session will be wiped. Even if you know how to copy your code from Ubuntu - something Google never teaches you - it's untestable outside of the lab session because you don't have the unreadable program.

I spent days of my life on programming sites, struggling to build 99% of the code so I could do the last 1% in the lab, refusing to take the easy out and just ask tech support for the answer, and finally I realized, "Why don't I just drop this class and stop spending 50 bucks a month for the privilege of teaching myself through Stackoverflow?"

Do that. Decide on a little project, maybe some simple math or folder organization. Use Regex101 and Tryit to see if your code works. Let Ubuntu run Python on your computer. Check Stackoverflow and other help sites to see how to transfer files. I promise you that however directionless you might feel, it's better than wading through this tar pit of a course. I am not finishing. Goodbye.

Qwiklabs is the weaklink in all of this. it hasn't worked well for me most of the time. Good information but absolutely horrendous qwiklabs user experience. I lost almost an hour of work because of the lousy service. Now I have to take my assesment all over again. Last time I had to wait over a week for qwiklabs to stop giving me zone resource error. I am highly dissatisfied with the service because of qwiklabs alone.

topics are rushed when it is supposed to be slowed and topics are slowed or spent much time when it could be rushed. demos are not show for enough time. have to pause videos in order to watch what commands are typed in terminal to make sense what is taught. tutor may have immense knowledge of the subject but is very bad at explaining stuff

I cannot end this course due to an issue with Qwiklabs.

It seems to be an error in Qwiklabs, but there is not a solution yet.

The error has been documented by email directed to support@qwiklabs.com.

The first Qwiklabs assignment is giving me an error, however when I ran the same code in pycharm it worked. Can someone please help?

My QWICKLABS were not operative and an error occured everytime saying "You have exceeded your quota" or something like this.

Focused solely on Linux. The Lab grading system is terrible. Otherwise a great course :)

poor lab functioning and no proper guidance in lab sessions

This is the second course in the Python Automation sequence, and I highly recommend it as a stand-alone introduction to using regex, python and bash scripting for log analysis and other automation jobs. The course feels like it was built with a clear list of skills it wanted students to come away with. Thank you! This structure was evident in how each module, lecture, and exercise was integrated into a learning whole, IMO. I never felt like I had been shipped out to tackle gotcha problems I was at a loss to know how to even start, as is my still-strong memory of introductory Course #1. Here in Course #2 each module's purpose made sense, and the assignments reinforced the student learning objectives. Often the assignments were very thoughtfully constructed so that you had to show mastery of not only the main concepts but the next-level deep of learning too.

I spent 2-3 weeks at the end on the final 7th week problem of parsing a log file. It was a real-world example I absolutely wanted to be able to implement later on my own. This final problem was an opportunity for me to pause in the course and self-assess what areas I really didn't know well enough, even as a beginner. So, I spent time reviewing basic things like data structures, regex, and object oriented programming fundamentals. Even then, I benefited from the student Forum discussions around this final problem, and really appreciate some of the clearly talented folks who share tips for making it over speed-bumps. I'm glad I took this pause to go deeper on basics, and may integrate this into my learning schedule for future courses. There is just so much to learn, and it pays to tolerate the confusion of forging ahead as well as being sure to circle back and reinforce fundamentals when you are ready to look again at a basic topic.

The instructor was great: knowledgable, encouraging that you could do the work assigned, and again, comfortable steering the ship with purpose. A real education leader.

There is a lot of useful information in this module and not only did I apply what I learned in Python from this module and the previous one, but I also learned some basics of Linux commands. Although I've been in the I.T. industry for years now, I haven't done programming in recent years. So I got sweaty palms when I was doing the final project. I did not sleep the night until I got it done. 🤣It went well that I followed Roger's advice to do it first outside of the lab because I get to explore my plan of action and think it through. 🏆 Lastly, I don't mind the in-between jokes at all. 😁

It was a great experience. All the material was new to me, i enjoy specially the linux commands: feel like had have superpowers! And i hae much to learn about unitest, bash scripting and read/write files, etc. But this was a perfect start to do that. Thanks Coursera Team!

An advice; there's an issue with Practice Quiz "Reading and Write csv files" on the week 2. A lot of student had has de same problem with the first question: it get an error, and the team support never could solve, so it will great if they can pay attention to this things.

Coursera is one of the best online learning platform. From this course I studied lot about Python programming and how to use it for OS level operations. Thank you, Coursera

I love this course a lot..! i have learnt many thing and a professional certification achievement no where receiving from home

Roger and fellow teacher, thank you so much for putting this course. Appreciate the knowledge on REGEX and Testing

This course deserves all stars. I'm glad I took it.

Bit tough but still good for engineers

Overall course was pretty good. A lot of learning came out of it. But a lot of wandering around and hours spent on the different forums and documentation trying to solve the problems in the course. Some of the instructions were often unclear as to what was expected for that problem's solution. The labs specially.

Time was spent developing solutions for the problems presented in the course outside the labs but when that code was executed on the linux labs, it gave problems while. For e.g. some of the modules had to be installed manually while some had to be replaced in the code since the syntax would not run on the old python version available on the qwiklabs machines.

Had a lot of things to learn in the module. wish labs and tests used out brains a bit more. it was mostly reading and cut and paste. Only learnt that you could cut and paste in Putty at the end when I got frustrated typing in things manually. (googled putty copy and paste).

there also alot of short cut code and tricks used that we havent learnt before. these werent explained very well and I still dont understand some of it, others took a me a bit of research.

The whole course is based on LINUX and is operated on the terminal. It does not mention how to convert the LINUX instructions to be executed smoothly on WINDOWS, which is the deficiency of the course.

I am still very happy to get the information about participating in this course. There are 4 courses later, which is a long way. I will continue the course while reviewing here. I believe I can become an IT expert at the end of the course.

Bash scripting is explained insufficiently and I feel that the final project is too difficult for most people who are not familiar with python libraries such as sys, operator and re. Would be great if there could be more detailed explanation on all the topics and more guidance for the final project. Overall, still a great course.

Would have loved more elaboration and videos on Bash Scripting as it is a wide topic and was a little difficult to grasp. The course overall is very informative and gives learners opportunities to try their hands on what they are learning.

COMPLICATED FOR WINDOWS USERS

The course is pretty good overall. The week 6 lab has a misleading "expected output" jpg for oldFiles.txt in it. This causes the first half "checkpoint" to fail. The issue is that the jpg shows that oldFiles.txt should only have filenames in it when in fact the "grader" expects each file to also have a fully qualified path with it. The lab write-up also doesn't say oldFiles.txt should have the filenames with the fully qualified path in it. I would give this course five stars if the errant week6 lab documentation gets fixed and if the students are explicitly told that each step in the labs needs to be explicitly execute in the VM environment being provided. I made the mistake of reading some of the lab exercises for content and not actually executing them in shell --- and I think the grader checks for that even if you get the correct final outputs for your script.

There are errors in links and descriptions of the tasks (formatting is wrong, names of files are different though according to the content it is the same file, etc). Inconsistency in tasks - first tasks are completely done for the student, one only need to copy-paste and final one is all of the sudden 'do-it-yourself' task. Though for me it was not a problem, but beginners will struggle a lot with this errors.

Assessments are too demanding despite they are good to augment candidates' knowledge. Would suggest to incorporate as exercise with explanation. Other course instructors had done well in this area and made participants engaging. Instructor ought to review the way he delivered his content too.