Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python)

Before you read this review, some notes about me (so you can form your own opinion about my review below):

- I have been interested in programming since I was little, but never gained any real experience in it until my adult life.
- I tried to take a Java course in college my freshman year and I struggled and had to drop out and ended up getting a degree something completely unrelated to computer science or math.
- I have a difficult time with the sometimes very "stuffy"/pretentious parts of formal academia at the university level (and many opinions about modern education :) )
- In my mid-20s I tried to teach myself C++ and struggled. Then I found Python and made it to defining a CLASS, but gave up because it was too hard. I decided to start over again with this course on Coursera (years later)

My review:

Section 1: At first I was very put off by Charles Severance's teaching and video lectures. This is because the first section of this course (7 sections) has nothing to do with teaching Python, but talking about machine language and computer functionality in general. I was eager to start Python, and I was not interested in the subject matter he was discussing (which by chance I already knew a lot about), and it seemed as though he recorded the lecture in 1 take with no formal notes or organization around the lectures - mostly just ramblings that I found hard to relate to anything Python-specific. This greatly disappointed me and I almost gave up.

DON'T GIVE UP. KEEP MOVING TO SECTION 2.

Sections 2-7: I had previously already taught myself everything this full 7 section course offers, so nothing came as a complete surprise. This is also my first course on coursera so I did not realize until around section 5 that we were supposed to read the chapter from Charles' book (which is free) Python for Everybody: Exploring Data Using Python 3 and then view the lectures. If you have never programmed before I recommend that you read these chapters first and then watch the lectures. If you have programmed before, you can skip the reading and watch the lectures until you hit material that is more challenging and then I recommend reading the chapter and following all of the exercises. As the material became more difficult it became more interesting and I grew to enjoy and appreciate the down-to-earth style that Charles has when teaching a concept in the course. I believe that he may be the person who can help me understand how to properly execute classes with functions in my coding.

The course was easy (I expected this), and I was only truly challenged on the last section (where the homework took me more than 5-10 mins to complete).

I look forward to the next section of this 5 part Python for Everybody course on Coursera, where I expect to be more challenged than in the first part (Getting Started with Python).

Thanks for reading this and I hope it helps others.

This is a great course. The teacher not only knows his material, but has a lot of experience working with first time programmers and so knows what errors they are likely to make and what questions they are likely to ask and addresses them all. He is fun to listen to, unlike some moocs I have taken where the teachers were reading and got the intonation all wrong--very distracting. This one wasn't like that by far. He was interesting and even funny at times. The only issue I have is that if you are auditing the class, it isn't as nice an experience. You can't submit quizzes to see if you got them right and all your coding problems are marked wrong. You can still do the coding and the website will error check and all, but you won't get the pass/fail grade to be sure you got it right. I worked through all the materials, including reading the chapters in the book in just four days. I'd say there is about 2 to 4 hours of work per "week" expected. So, great course, but Coursera has become more interested in making money than in those of us who must only audit. It is not worth my time to chase up financial aid for something I'm working through so quickly. I'd rather spend the time working on a portfolio for future work than to bother about all that. I'm disabled, so I have no money to through at the problem. So, if you can only audit the class, is it worth it? YES! Just prepared to be highly annoyed with Coursera. The problem isn't the instructor's fault and I'm glad to have the materials. The videos covers what's in the book, but in an easy to understand way, so when you read the chapter associated with it, you can follow along without it being too dry or laborious. Then you are ready for the quiz and coding problem(s), and then a little wrap up material before moving on to the next lesson. I'm glad we are allowed to work ahead. I'm moving on to the second course in the specialization, which picks up where this one left off. If you want to learn Python or just "a" programing language to get a start or just dabble in programming, this is a great place to start!

To be honest, I thought the course stumbled and fell short. It was far too basic and slow paced. Considering how little is taught, even for a beginner's course in Python, it could hardly be described as college-level material.
The tone was a bit immature at times, and perhaps appropriate for a grade school level classroom--not something for college students or working professionals. Even if the goal were to teach those having absolutely no programming experience, the course could accomplish that while providing more content by doing the following: keep up the pace of the lectures, give better (more relevant) coding examples, and remove the portions of the lectures that are irrelevant to the course objectives.
Is the course worth the price? Hell no. If you do pay, you may feel very cheated at the end. The entire course can be reduced to 3 pages of notes. One would be better off checking into other free, online tutorials.
I'm not sure about the value of all of the videos titled "Office Hours." They look like nothing more than self-promotional behavior from the professor, as if to say, "hey look how great I am making this irrelevant two-minute video in Paris." They're really nothing more than that.

In one video, Severance corners a guest speaker at a conference, who appears annoyed after a few minutes and gives a polite brush-off: "other people here would like to speak with me too." It's obvious that Severance didn't set up the interview beforehand or warn the other person that he was going to be videotaped. Things like that make the professor look naive, unprepared, and unprofessional. After all of these videos, you will ask yourself, "okay, why did Severance make me watch that?" "What was the point?" And you'll shrug your shoulders and say, "gee, thanks for wasting my time … again."

I work in lesson design and blended learning teacher training. I train teachers how to combine effective teaching practices with technology in K-8 classrooms. There is lots of room for improvement in this course. I would not recommend it to someone with no experience. I have no experience in coding, and did well in this course because I went to other sources to answer my questions and fill the knowledge gaps in this course. Though the instructor was great. He seems very passionate.

From a teaching/pedagogy standpoint the scope and sequence was poor. It went from extremely broad (defining computer parts) to hyper specific (defining variables in python) really quick. There was no information between on the practical pieces of what python is, what it looks like on our computer, and how we interact with it.

It feels like multiple people got together to build the course, but after it was finished they never came back to say “Here’s where we didn’t communicate, let’s edit these things.”

There is a HUGE disconnect between writing python programs and running them vs. running the actual python platform and typing commands line by line. The most frustrating thing was that every example in the course was given as a line of code in the python platform with the chevron prompt, and every single assignment was about writing a program in the text editor and the running the program. I didn’t realize these were two completely different things until about week 6. PLEASE ADDRESS THIS. Make it clear for future students that this is a thing. Go over how to use both, and the benefits and drawbacks of each. Make it clear that your examples are taking place in the command line python platform, but our homework is writing programs and saving and running them. I didn’t understand the use of the ‘type’ function until I realized this discrepancy. This was so confusing.

Some of the quiz questions were very specific questions that were mentioned for about a second or never explicitly made clear. Some of the ideas that were emphasized or mentioned multiple times in the same lecture video (seemed important) were never asked on the quiz. I can give examples of both.

I learned some stuff, but overall I would not recommend this course without pointing to the discrepancies. I would say there are multiple obvious areas for improvement and multiple gaps in knowledge that I filled from other sources. I could give more specific examples, but I feel like I already wrote quite a bit.

With so many glowing reviews, I don't think mine matters, but here it is anyway: This course is amazing.

This course is so amazing that a) I realized I threw away way too much money on a different "introduction to python" course that had live instructors and one-on-one access to mentors because this class was free and far more beneficial; and b) when I'm done writing this review, I'm going to sign up for the whole Coursera Python for Everybody specialization.

The Python playground is amazing, but it isn't even necessary because the instructor provides such great material for getting Python installed and running on your computer (with windows, mac, and linux instructions), even a complete beginner would be able to follow the instructions and make a functioning script in no time. But the playground is just a lot of fun to play with, and makes tinkering as a beginner super easy.

I spent one whole day and finished the entire Getting Started with Python course (auditing, no quizzes), and learned more than I learned in the first 4 weeks of a 6 week paid course. Dr. Chuck is GOOD at what he does. He presents material in a very down-to-earth manner in clear, plain language that's technical, but not over my head. I have very little experience with programming, and know the basics of computers and computing, but even the introduction to hardware architecture was fascinating and I learned more about hardware than I expected. I felt a lot more prepared to dive into programming after that lecture.

The amazing thing is that so much is crammed into such short lectures, and yet the material is still accessible.

Speaking of accessibility: the lectures have captions AND interactive transcripts. The audio is crisp and clear, as is the video-- without background noise or distractions. The dedication to accessibility has blown me away and is another big reason I plan to support Coursera by paying for the specialization path.

DON'T GIVE UP SO SOON. KEEP ON MOVING TO COURSE 2 OF THIS SPECIALIZATION.

Sections 1-7: I had no previous knowledge about programming, even my educational background doesn't related to computer science at all. I have passion for working on the computer as a graphic designer as well as website designer, I thought I must have knowledge of programming language in order to ease my work as a website designer, but everything in this full 7 section course offers me the basic knowledge of programming with python, so nothing came as a complete surprise, that's why I mustn't quit so soon, I need to proceed to the next course to have viable workable experience in this specialization.

This is also my first course on coursera so I did not realize until around section 3 that we were supposed to read the chapter from Charles' book (which is free) Python for Everybody: Exploring Data Using Python 3 and then view the lectures. If you have never programmed before I recommend that you read these chapters first and then watch the lectures. If you're a programmer, you can skip the reading and watch the lectures until you hit material that is more challenging and then I recommend reading the chapter and following all of the exercises for the beginners.

In my own opinion Dr. Chuck is a great lecturer although he somehow seems to be funny sometimes but I really interested in this course because of him. If everyone of the lecturer happen to be like him even an academic challenged individual can easily master the subject matter. All the topics of discussion were explicitly stated. All the videos were well organised in a logical manner. As the material became more difficult it became more interesting and I grew to enjoy and appreciate the down-to-earth style that Dr. Chuck has when teaching a concept in the course. I believe that he may be the person who can help me realize my dream in programming and understand how to properly execute classes with functions in my coding.

The course was easy (I expected this), and I was only truly challenged on the last section of the course where the homework took me more than 5-10 mins to complete. Anyway, I was astonished when I got it later.
I'm looking forward to the next section of this 5 part specialization of Python for Everybody course on Coursera, where I expect to be more challenged than in the first part (Getting Started with Python).

Thanks for reading this and I hope it will be of help to you.

I recently completed the "Programming for Everybody" course offered by the University of Michigan on Coursera, and I must say it was an excellent introduction to Python programming. As someone with little prior programming experience, this course provided me with a solid foundation in Python and ignited my passion for coding.

The course content was well-structured and delivered in a clear and engaging manner. Dr. Charles Severance, the instructor, did an exceptional job explaining the concepts, making them accessible to beginners like myself. The course started with the basics, gradually progressing to more advanced topics, ensuring a smooth learning curve.

One aspect that stood out was the hands-on approach. Each week, we had programming assignments that allowed us to apply the concepts learned and gain practical experience. The assignments were thoughtfully designed, providing a balance between challenge and achievable tasks. Additionally, the auto-grader system provided prompt feedback, which was immensely helpful in my learning journey.

The interactive textbook, "Python for Everybody," was an invaluable resource. It presented the material in a concise and comprehensible manner, with practical examples that reinforced the concepts covered in the lectures. The supplementary materials, including video transcripts and practice quizzes, further enhanced the learning experience.

The discussion forums were a vibrant community of learners, where we could ask questions, seek clarification, and interact with fellow students. The active participation of both students and teaching assistants fostered a supportive learning environment.

By the end of the course, I had gained a solid understanding of Python programming concepts, including variables, data structures, loops, conditional statements, and functions. I felt confident enough to start working on personal projects and continue my coding journey.

In summary, I highly recommend the "Programming for Everybody" course to anyone looking to learn Python from scratch. The course provides a solid foundation, with clear explanations, practical assignments, and an engaging learning environment. Whether you're a beginner or have some programming experience, this course is an excellent starting point to develop your coding skills.

First off, this course is TRULY for everybody. It is simple enough for a person with zero computer science (or programming) experience could follow and complete without getting overwhelmed by technical complexity. I think the decision of Dr. Charles Severance to split the course into two was a brilliant idea. I am an experienced programmer with teaching experience at the college level and I have to say this approach is what I have always advocated for.

The contents of the course was fantastic. My only observations are that the book (which I purchased) should be more prominently shown. I think the book is great and very reasonably priced. If you are a prospective student reading this review, I encourage to buy it and read along during the course. I promise you that there are a couple of things you might not be able to fully grasp unless you read through the chapters as you are studying the various units

My last observation (and maybe this will be discussed in detail later) is that the concept of (primitive) data types could've been discussed in a bit more detail. Yes, there were discussions about strings, integers, floats, Booleans, and Nones (nulls), but never really in sufficient detail to explain when covering methods argument types and return types. At this level, I think it is important for students to know, for instance, why passing a number to a function or a string to the same function seems to work fine, whereas sometimes you need to convert from one type to the other to do stuff.

Aside for those two observations, I am very pleased with the course; hence my five-star rating. I am really looking forward to proceed with the second part of this course.

Hector Fontanez
Software Engineer
Fort Worth, Texas

Most of the low reviews are from people who are not the target audience of this Specialization. If you already have a background in programming or impatient, this isn't for you. This is meant to be a complete INTRO class specialization.

The teacher is super knowledgeable, but doesn't let that get in the way of knowing his audience. He understands we're beginners, and even in his passionate rambling about real world applications (or movies) it never goes beyond a beginner level of understanding. In fact, those passionate ramblings just make the subject SO much more approachable and him more human for it.

So many programming classes I've taken where the teacher was passionate, but they didn't understand that they were living within muscle memory and skipping over nuances that beginners don't have. They operated with a level of assumption that had forgotten how they were when they were just dipping their toes into code.

I'm so grateful for this class and I am grateful for a teacher that understands knowledge is power and it should be accessible to all!

This was my first MOOC so I went in with an open mind and no expectations. I had absolutely no dev experience so I was looking for an online course that was truly for beginners.

The course consists of an eBook and online videos/assignments/quizzes. The professor Dr. Charles Severance is passionate about Python and enthusiastic about sharing his knowledge. He is engaging in the online lectures. In addition to the lectures, he also adds interviews and other relevant video clips - these extras made me feel like I was truly a part of this course.

The assignments/quizzes are due on a weekly basis and must be completed by Sunday evening. I felt this helped me hold myself accountable - even when I had things going on, I prioritized getting my assignment and quiz in prior to Sunday.

I enjoyed this course so much that I've decided to complete the entire Coursera Learn to Program and Analyze Data with Python Specialization.

I really enjoyed the online course. I thought it was well planned and layed out, easy for me to follow. The work load(h.w. & test)was just enough, so i could finish everything with enough time, learn about the topics and not feel over loaded and rushed.



Overall I really like this class because all lectures, assignments, and tests are straight forward. A couple things I dislike about the class are that there should be more opportunities for extra credit and it would be awesome if the final was an objective essay about what we have learned in this class or what we like about the class. I believe that I have more knowledge about ocean, weather, and marine lives and hopefully, I can use them in real life.



The course was everything you said it would be, fun but a lot of work. And it was! I enjoyed the web-labs because they were a lot of fun and easy to understand. And the answers were usually somewhere in the text. I also liked the assignments that required us to get online. Sometimes articles aside from the reading book gave me a better idea and understanding of the subject for that week. What I disliked was the short essay question because I found it difficult to explain certain concepts without introducing in some way, Ideas from the course notes or book (keeping in mind plagiarism). I never expected to learn so much from an online class; I now see the ocean life in a whole new way. I know I could have done better, but in the end I learned that an online class could be as much work or more than a regular class. However, I still enjoyed it very much.



I really enjoyed this class and the format it was presented in. For me, I learn and retain much more through an online class due to the fact you can do the course as an ¡§open book.¡¨ This really makes me search for the answer and in return, I retain more information. I found it relaxing to be able to turn the work on the assignments and test at my leisure and when I had the time. I liked the fact you were very clear that more internet research may be necessary for some assignments To be honest, there is nothing that I disliked about the course. I will definitely be taking another online course from you!



To be honest , this was my first online class. I am looking forward to taking more online classes. The experience of this class has being nothing but positive. I thought the coarse outline/power point was extremely helpful. The homework, quizzes and test were reasonable. I would have enjoyed experiencing a field trip to Carlsbad or Oceanside, my only suggestion would be to have more days available for those who cannot make it on the specific time/day. Maybe a field trip later in the day? Or another weekend? I have to say this class made me more aware of current event dealing with the ocean and weather. I also did something for the first time as a north county resident, I participated in the annual grunion run in Carlsbad. Lots of fun!!! Enjoy the summer Mr.T.



I really liked learning about the tide pools and local labs. Originally I enrolled in this class because I am not from CA or even a coastal areas ( I am from WI) so I thought it would be good to learn a little about the waves, swells and currents as I venture into the water a little more the longer I have lived here. I had no idea the depth of the earth’s oceans or the importance of them. I really liked the online option of this class because I am a very busy person (2 jobs and college). The only thing that was a little confusing at first was all the different resources. In the beginning I had a hard time finding the answers to questions because I wasn’t sure where to look. The book, Notes, PowerPoint presentations, web-labs, the cd with the book… Just was a little much but as the semester progressed I got the feel of it and benefited from all the information

This is the first class in the new (at the time I took it) Python for Everybody specialization, which grew out of Dr. Charles Severence's popular course of the same name. As I understand it, the first two courses of this specialization will cover the material from the previous course, while the third and fourth courses and the capstone will cover new material.

This is a very gentle introduction to programming in Python. The videos are very thorough, and Dr. Chuck does a good job of going over everything he's teaching in great detail. As I had a fair amount of experience in R and some experience with Python (Codecademy course and Genomic Data Science with Python course), I found this to be very easy, and I raced through the class in a few hours, listening to the videos on 2x speed. One of the big problems I have with this course and similar ones (like the Rice Python courses) is the use of web-based coding platforms. While they're useful for real-time checking of code, students who learn to use these platforms may end up completely lost if they try to go apply their programming experience from these courses to a real-world problem. I would much prefer to see programming taught via command line or using an IDE like Spyder.

Overall, four stars. Very thorough, very slow-paced. I imagine that finishing this specialization will only get students to the novice programmer stage, but it is a good first step, and probably the most approachable programming course out there for those with no experience.

Pros: The instructor is very passionate and knows code inside and out. I truly believe he did his best to teach students basic Python language. I'm not convinced he is well equipped to teach beginner Python courses in the "real" world....let alone an online course with no real feedback, tutors or interactive assignments along the way. You WILL learn basic Python language, but I'm quite confident most students will not be able to accurately write code upon completion of the certification.

Cons: My biggest complaint is the fact that there is that there is no real tutoring available. Nobody to talk to one-on-one and students helping students is strictly prohibited. Several students attempted to help me and they promptly got their hands slapped with the threat of breaking the "Honor Code." Too bad the tutors were not this prompt when we asked for help with our code. It takes them days to reply.... ugh. Discussions in the public forum is the only source of communication available to the students to my knowledge. This is where Coursera fails miserably. Coupled with the fact that all of the assignments are directly inline with the course material.... until the very last one. I easily passed every quiz and assignment until 5.2. The discussion threads for this particular week are double and triple all the other threads for a reason. They have strategically built your confidence along the way to send you the subliminal message that "You can do this!" In assignment 5.2 they make it nearly impossible to complete. After spending only a few weeks (and incidentally only $50) up until the very last assignment, I ended up spending an additional $150 before I finished 5.2. At least I wasn't the only sucker....I was so frustrated I literally gave up for 60 days due to the holidays, stress at home, my whole family contracting COVID, etc, etc. In the end, I merely had to change the order of the input to get my code to give the correct output. How is this possible? My code is either right or wrong. I shouldn't be able to change the order of the input to get the correct output and code to ultimately get a passing grade. There is a glitch somewhere in your grading system. A little ironic for a professional coding class if you ask me. In an earlier assignment I knew my code was right, but I was not getting the correct output. Out of sheer desperation, I highlighted my code, copied it, cleared the assignment board, went back to the home screen, refreshed the page, went back into the assignment portal, pasted the EXACT code that was there earlier, clicked the tab "CHECK CODE" and the output miraculously worked. Yet another glitch.

Before I began the course, I was so eager to learn Python. To be quite honest, this course has turned me off. I would not recommend this course to anyone. I would strongly recommend enrolling in an in-person class or an online class with a tutor who is available at all times.

This is the first programming course that I have ever taken and I can say that I was pleasantly surprised how beginner friendly it was. I just got past chapter 5 and I am getting relatively comfortable reading simple programs. The only reason I did not give it a whole 5 stars is I believe it could be improved a bit by putting 4 or 5 optional practice exercises on writing programs at the end of each chapter. I say this because at this point in the class I am way more comfortable reading code than writing it. I believe if there were more opportunities than just once or twice at the end of every chapter to write a program from scratch I would be more comfortable writing my own programs by now. I think they should do 3 or 4 practice exercises and have videos along with those at the end of each chapter before the actual exercises, not to show you how to write them but to give a little guidance on how to start writing them or to give you hints on writing them. It feels like at the end of every chapter, maybe not the first few but at least on chapter 4 and 5 I got thrown in the water and was told to swim with out any help or instructions on how to swim. I say this because the programs we are asked to write at the end of these chapters are way longer and more complex than any examples we have seen so far in the book or the videos, so by either including some practice exercises in the videos or adding videos to go along with some extra practice exercises once you get to the actual exercise you would feel a lot more comfortable tackling them and not get stuck on them forever. Another thing I believe would improve the course is a updated place to talk to other people around the world that are also taking the course. At the beginning of the course I posted a question on the forum and months later I still have got no reply. Maybe if they made the forum or or something like it mandatory to ask or answer or answer 2 to 3 questions every chapter there would be a lot more interaction on the forum. It would be very helpful if Coursera made an app or a website that was mandatory to download and participate in when taking these classes and on that app you choose what class you are taking and everyone else that is taking it at the moment would been on there as well where you could post questions, answers, and private message people to discuss things and also maybe have some mentors on there it would really help when you get stuck on something and have no one to turn to to help talk you through whatever problem you are having without having to look up the answer. Maybe it could be in the form of a social media website/app but your friend group is the people who are enrolled in the same course as you and then the mentors could be people who have been through all or at least all of the classes up to the class you are in, because the most difficult thing about this course is not being able to ask someone a question when you need something explained or you need someone to help walk you through the problem you are having. Another way this could be done is through an AI bot that could help you through the problem you are having but I believe that real people would be a lot more helpful and almost be like having a live teacher which is the main thing this course is missing because when you cannot figure out an exercise where you have to write a program and you are lost on how to start writing it or lost on how to do something while writing it it almost feels as if you have to either post a question on reddit or stackoverflow which can be helpful but a lot of times the answers you get on there are too advanced or like on stackoverflow where they don't let you post your question because they consider it a duplicate question that somebody has already asked or when they do let you ask the question the people who answer it answer it act like you should already know things that you might not know yet which can get very frustrating. All in all I have really enjoyed the course up to this point. The two things I would change like I said is the fact that when you get confused or lost on something there is no direct place you can reach out to other people taking the course or who have finished the course to ask questions (where people will actually respond). I think the discussion boards are a good idea just poorly executed and the other thing I would change is more practice exercises at the end of each chapter on writing your own programs with a video to give you some hints or point you in the right direction to go along with them or it would be really cool if there was an AI assistant that could almost act as a teacher that you could ask questions to about how to start out writing a program and could give you hints and help you along the way without giving you the answer or writing the program for you.
Thank you Coursera and Dr. Chuck for the opportunity to take these courses without Coursera and these courses there is no way I would be able to afford to go to college and take them so I think it is really cool what you all are doing!

-Sincerely,
Madison MacCoon

I'm a UofM grad with a BSEE degree and worked has a hardware engineer for about 10 years before becoming a stay-at-home mom for the past 16. With my sights set on slowly making my way back into the workforce, Python sounded like a good stepping stone. It's been almost 30 years since I did much programming while at UM so this course was the perfect refresher course. Since it's geared towards people with absolutely no programming experience what-so-ever, I found it to be pretty easy but not boring at all.

Professor Severance did an amazing job teaching this class and I wish I had a professor like him when I was a student at UofM. He's obviously very knowledgeable on this topic but also very charismatic, funny and kept the course interesting.

The exercises were just right and I was really impressed by the Playground and how much effort it must have taken to put together such a polished course. This is only my second Coursera course, but my favorite so far. Looking forward to finishing up the Python for Everyone Specialization!

I don't participate in that course, but my wife and I support her, if necessary (I have over 40 years experience in software development, so I can help, but I'm a bad techer for beginners). She is working in offices since more that 30 years, using Word and other office tools, but had never learned how to program during her life. All other announced beginner courses led always to the problem, that a general understanding how a computer works is required. This course introduces the very basic things for an absolute beginner in an understandable way, so she got the feeling, that programming is not a magic thing and starts meanwhile with experiments. Together with the textbook and using an editor and some minor hints from me, she is able to write small programs after the first 3 weeks.

It should be annotated that the course has not the goal to make a real programmer, but to give an understanding (~feeling) what programming is. This goal will be reached for sure

I loved this class. I liked the manner of the teacher, loose but everything said was important. The examples covered the concepts well and the textbook too. I loved that I was really programming and using real world examples.

For some this is a plus: the speed of the class. Personally, I found the beginning chapters easy, so the end "working example" seemed an appropriate. But the last two chapters (4and 5) felt rushed. There was so much to absorb: Functions (and all their flavors), Loops (conceptually is easy but programmatically increases difficulty exponentially), when to use try/except, None as a Type, Debugging. I think a class could be done on debugging alone! If possible, I'd break the Functions class and the Loops class each into 2 separate classes, for a total of 4.

For a true beginner, someone with absolutely no technical background (i.g. someone like my mom), getting started would have been hard. She knows nothing about cmd prompts or how to work in them (Heck, she has trouble installing an app.) A non-required video section on how to set that up and explanation of what it is plus a screenshot of basic commands (cd, ls, -l , how to use TAB or arrows to get existing values etc), would have helped.

Ditto for using Atom. It seems obvious to people in tech to "google" any question they have about a new app (e.g. for keystroke shortcuts etc) but to a truly new person to programming, it is not obvious. I struggled with moving quickly in Atom at first. It's well laid out but I got confused with tabs/spaces and spent lots of time fumbling with syntax errors there.

Loved that the condensed text chapters were available as well as the slides, but didn't really discover them until midway through the class. For someone less inquisitive, they would have been missed. Perhaps an intro to Coursera layout video would be helpful as well.

Finally, a shoutout to the assistants who answered (probably the same) questions over and over in the Forums. I was at my wit's end, having looked at other's questions for ideas, my own program for hours and with no other help, I would have been done for without their prompts and suggestions. I can't thank them enough for their time and patience.

I have no prior knowledge of Python or coding or programming, but as a researcher, I know I need to learn how to use Python to do more interesting and complex analyses. However, every time I've tried to learn Python (or anything else coding-related, really), I've given up because all "beginner" courses or workshops I've tried to go to were not beginner-friendly. They already assumed you had experience or knowledge of Python and never bothered to explain anything lmao. This course has been the ONLY course I've tried where I actually learned something, which has made me ENJOY coding for once, and I will be continuing with the rest of the courses on the specialization because of this. Dr. Chuck was a great instructor, I think his passion and knowledge really shine, and I was so grateful when in week 1 he mentioned the frustrations I've had in past courses (that usually courses assume too much of students). I also really admire his dedication to teaching, providing free and detailed resources for people, allowing them to be translated, etc. This is something that I think more academics need to do.

With regards to the content, I thought the book, extra materials, lecture videos, and slides were well-organized and very informative. Dr. Chuck does a great job explaining the fundamentals of Python, how things work, what they do, and why they're important. I also like the playback rate feature on the videos, which allows you to slow or speed up the video whenever you want.

The quizzes and assignments really forced me to put the knowledge of the videos to use, and it felt great to get things right, haha. I got frustrated with assignment 4.6 but after coming back the day after to try again, and re-watching the week 5-6 lectures, I realized my mistakes and got the assignment correct. While the lazy person in me hates having deadlines and assignments, I REALLY appreciated them since it forced me to actually use python rather than just making notes from the lectures.

A bit of a disclaimer: while I got stuck on assignment 4.6, I didn't go into the forum and I never bothered interacting with other students, so I can't review how the forum or teaching assistants are. I will say that the autograder is neat, and works well enough, but sometimes the feedback it provides is a little vague and confusing. Overall, it was good, tho.

One thing I will say, tho this probably shows how much of a beginner I am, but after just the first course Idk how python could be useful to me, i.e. how it could be used to analyze data or do anything practical. This is because the examples provided are of course made to be super simple in order to understand what python can do. This is great for understanding the fundamentals, but it also means you would have to take the other python courses in order to understand how to APPLY python in your everyday life. As such, JUST taking this course by itself may not be enough. I'm hoping the rest of the specialization will go on to explain how to apply python (I'm particularly interested in the capstone course). Regardless, if you know absolutely NOTHING about python and have been frustrated by other courses claiming to be beginner-friendly, give this one a shot as an introduction to python.

Thanks, Dr. Chuck!

Before I dive into reviewing the course, here's some background on my experience with python up to the point of registering in the course to give context to the review as I believe it makes a difference.

My academic background is in Actuarial Science and Financial Mathematics. Basically a mosh between a lot of Mathematics & Statistics, and Business (Finance & Accounting mainly). My actual programming experience is one introductory C++ course and that's it.

Fast forward, AI / ML and specifically DL came to be the hottest thing in the universe. And me being an Actuary, data and modeling (and forecasting in specific) are basically all what I do, I was instantly taken by the drive to learn how to develop ML models. After some research, I decided to choose Python as the language to facilitate learning ML. One Problem though, I know nothing about it. So I decided to watch one 45 min video on YouTube that summarized what Python is and how to get "the hang of it" IF YOU'RE ALREADY FAMILIAR WITH THE CONCEPT OF PROGRAMMING which was my case.

Then I registered in Andrew's deep learning specialization and finished it. However, at the time I didn't really now how to write Python, rather I knew how to write ML models in Python. This was fine for some time until I was faced with the reality that this wasn't nearly enough. I kept running into trivial issues while mainly wrangling data because I didn't speak enough Python. So I decided to take this course, Python for Everybody, and learn Python properly.

Now comes the review.
I was done with the course in 2 days. I wasn't rushing or anything, but thanks to my previous struggles, what I already knew of Python was more than enough for the this course. Therefore, I don't think that my review is very useful since the course wasn't intended for someone with a similar scenario to mine. But if I'm to be as objective as possible and not pick on nits, I'd say it's a great course and recommend it to any non-programmer.