Using Python to Access Web Data

I have one big criticism of this class. The Python keyword "import" is never explained. The concept of "module" is never explained.

We're just told to cant this magic incantation "import re" and suddenly statements that generated traceback errors suddenly don't. Even more intriguingly, python now seems to recognize regular expressions!

Later, we're just told to cant another magic incantation "import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET" and now there are actually new data types!

How this happens is never explained.

To make this class perfect, you just need to add one -- just one -- lecture which explains what modules are and what importing them does. Take if from "just type this magic incantation," to "this is how we can add functions and data types and methods and expand python."

Python itself is a wonderfully-compact little language, just 33 keywords and just eight data types. Python itself can't interpret regular expressions, can't parse XML or JSON, can't convolve matrices of complex number. What makes Python such an amazing language is that one of the keywords is "import." With import, we can expand python to interpret regular expressions, parse XML or JSON, and convolve matrices of complex number too. You can even write a program that can convolve matrices of complex numbers that come from a web-based source in the JSON, all in one program. This is why it's so important to understand modules and libraries of modules and understand what import does. It shouldn't be taught as just some mysterious magical incantation.

Students should be taught that there are standard libraries of python modules available, that there are countless non-standard libraries and modules which are also available to "use at your own risk," that many companies and institutions have in-house libraries, and that they can even learn to create their own libraries if they want to (though the mechanics of this can be left to another class).

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.
Sorry for the bad feedback, but this is honestly how I felt about the course!

As I mentioned in the previous reviews about this Specialization, all these courses are meant for beginners without previous programming experience and difficulty of courses rises gradually.

Thus, the first course was a real piece of cake, second got a little tougher and this one is the first course that really took me some time to finish it. This time I really had to listen to some lectures twice, to debug my code a hell lot of times and to stick to the sample code a lot.

Students, who have programming experience might still think that this course is too slow and easy, but it is a great way for the beginner to learn python.

However, it seemed like Dr.Chuck had too much stuff to show us in a single course, that made it impossible for him to explain everything that was done, which was done in the 2 first courses.

Now it's just "type this, you won't know what it is and why you type it, but it'll make your program work". So you end up copy pasting Dr.Chuck's code without knowing what you're doing.

I would have preferred this course divided into more courses to go deeper in the modules or functions, so we can understand pretty much everything we do, and write the code from scratch. It could even have been a 10 weeks course instead of 6 and I wouldn't have minded.

All in all, I'm satisfied with what I've learned, but I had to go to many other websites to understand the course material.

Although my specialty is zoology, I signed up and paid for this course (one in a series offered by them) to learn a little about Python which intrigued me for some reason.

The course gives a somewhat disjointed, quick overview of using Python to access web data, but Professor Severance does try to touch shallowly on a good array of the relevant subject matter.

The real sin, however, (and the entire reason I’m taking the time to post this review) is to be found in the course’s abomination of a forum, where the “teaching assistants” are aggressively unhelpful. A teaching forum is intended to be a resource for students who have hit a wall in an assignment and need a few well-placed words of guidance to get them over a hump, but there is none of that found here.

Right around week 5 of this 6 week course was an assignment that a fair number of students had trouble with (judging by the number of questions in the forum) . I read several student to teaching assistant exchanges on the forum where a student just couldn’t figure out that bit of code with the vague “guidance” they had received, and when they had the temerity to persist with their questions, were cut off at the knees by the teaching assistant, and instructed to stop asking . . Really condescending, uncalled for, and shocking, quite frankly, in an educational setting.

I would highly recommend that if you want to learn to use Python to access web data, or any of the other courses in the Python for Everybody series at the University of Michigan, you seek out some other, more professionally run courses where you can get actual assistance if you have a question. There are certainly plenty to choose from.

With this review, you must understand, a major part of this review is because of my interest/expectations/etc., what I was looking for from the course. If you are interested in “fully engaging” in Python, becoming a computer scientist, etc., this course if fine. Me, I’m an engineer by profession. About every 5 years, I go back and take a class to keep my programming skills up. So, my interests in programming would be about 80% math implementation, 20% string/list/character manipulation. This course was all string/list/character manipulation, I felt. So, I was turned off by the course.

This course definitely isn’t a beginner Python course. You need to have had Python experience before taking this course.

Other things I will describe briefly. They are only examples.

First, I didn’t know we would get into things like XML and JSON has deeply as we did. If I wanted to learn XML or JSON, I would have taken a course on those. I was interested in learning Python, not XML and JSON.

Given that, I couldn’t understand why we were learning things in this course. I could understand much of what the programs were doing. But, “why” learn this information? Like, in one program, I felt I have done the manipulation much, much easier and faster with “copy-n-paste” and MS Excel. So, why make a Python program to do the manipulation? I couldn’t tell why.

Given that, I felt that Dr. Chuck was doing more along the lines of “forcing” this information onto us during this course. Something like, not a quote but what it seemed like, “Python can do this, so just do it. Don’t worry about learning it. Just do it.” But, then, he wants us to demonstrate our ability in the knowledge and programming at the end of the chapter?

In summary, again, if you want to get “fully engaged” in everything Python can do, aka become a computer scientist, this course will probably be good for you. But, for me, sorry, but it lacked what I look for from a programming course.

As I mentioned in the previous reviews about this Specialisation, all these courses are meant for beginners without previous programming experience and difficulty of courses rises gradually.
Thus, the first course was a real piece of cake, second got a little tougher and this one is the first course that really took me some time to finish it. This time I really had to listen to some lectures twice, to debug my code a hell lot of times and to stick to the sample code a lot.
Students, who have programming experience might still think that this course is too slow and easy, but it is a great way for the beginner to learn python.
The only problem that seems to appear is new coursera policy, that doesn't allow you to submit assignments before you pay for the course, e.g. you can only get access to theory unless you pay. But there is a solution - Dr Chuck has created his own website to complete these courses https://www.py4e.com//
To sum up: great course, uprising difficulties, recommend to enroll after finishing previous courses. 10/10

I am working my way through the Python Specialization. The first two courses were fantastic. This course, "Using Python to Access Web Data", was a bit of a struggle. While I still like Dr. Chuck's on camera teaching and the examples he provided, the course assignments and quizzes in this tranche require knowledge that is not provided in either the book, video, or slides. In a few instances, knowledge needed to complete an assignment was provided in a later learning session. On more than one occasion I found myself saying...I wish this had been presented in the previous week.

In one or two of the assignments, the code that was provided as the primer included commands not taught until later in the course. This left me trying to figure out the relevance to the current assignment (there was no relevance). Ultimately, the geocoding references had to be deleted (or ignored) from the starting code to make the XML retrieve work.

The 'decode()' command provide to be very useful to the XML assignment. I don't think enough explanation and emphasis was placed upon this when taught. Once you apply this to your code, the XML output when printing becomes so much more useful if you are attempting to understand the XML structure and hierarchy.

The ElementTree library is not well explained. In fact, all libraries presented in this course to date are not well explained. They get blackbox treatment in the code examples and assignments. The Python website has a lot more information for those seeking a better understanding (https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html).

There is a data return in the XML assignment which I think is a list of memory locations. This is not explained anywhere in the course (in fact, I am guessing that the returned bits are memory locations...I still don't know for certain).

There are a few computer history video's in the course that are over my head. I'm still not sure what REST is and how it governs HTTP transfers. That said, it probably would be an interesting topic if I knew a little more. Maybe if I had taken Dr Chucks other class on networking it would have had more value to me?

All this said, I like the fundamental information in this course and I like what I am learning in Python. This review is not to discourage. Rather, you should take the class and realize there are a few shortcomings. Don't be surprised if you struggle through a few assignments.

As many have said, this was a good course. I can now do so many things I couldn't do after the 2 first courses.

However, it seemed like Dr.Chuck had to much stuff to show us in a single course, that made it impossible for him to explain everything that was done, which was done in the 2 first courses.

Now it's just "type this, you won't know what it is and why you type it, but it'll make your program work". So you end up copy pasting Dr.Chuck's code without knowing what you're doing.

I would have prefered this course divided into more courses to go deeper in the modules or functions, so we can understand pretty much everything we do, and write the code from scratch. It could even have been a 12 weeks course instead of 6 and I wouldn't have minded.

All in all, i'm satisfied with what i've learned, but I had to go to many other websites to understand the course material.

TL, dr: Flawed course in comparison to the first two ones.

The course introduce new concepts, more or less technical to understand what's going on when you try to access web data from an external application, such as a programming language. If you're new to programming like myself, you could feel a bit overwhelmed at times, but with a little patience and dedication, you end up understanding the whole process and why it could be useful to use code to access web data. The instructor is helpful and does a good job in this part.

However, I have two great objections to the course:
The first one is that there is no explanations about libraries and modules. The course relies heavily in them not only for the assignments but for the lectures. If the specialization claims to be for any person without programming language but don't include any explanation about these features, is missing a crucial part for the students to know what they're doing. And sorry but just hearing the instructor says 'type this and it will work' is not a valid explanation, at least for me.

The second one is about the course structure. Because it explains so many new concepts, some of them are treated only at surface level, without providing a deep explanation. I wouldn't have minded do two or three more weeks or even an additional course if this would have given a better understanding of concepts such XML, sockets, REST architecture or JSON. In addition to this, at times some code are explained after need it to do previous assignments so at not few times, I ended up looking for solution on the internet or copy/paste the code provided in the assignment because I couldn't understand what I was doing.

On a side note, although I enjoyed week 6 the most, the videos about APIs usage must be reviewed. Google geocoding requires an API key now so when you type the code and try to access data, it returns an error. The one about Twitter API is directly useless in which you need a Twitter account (I don't have one and don't have plans to have it in the future) to follow the lecture.

I just completed the course. It is excellent, but needs a few bug fixes.

The Week 5 Chapter assignment references the wrong exemplar (not wrong, per se, but far more complex than a simpler example covered in the lectures that transfers better to the assignment).

This threw a lot of people and protracted completion of the exercise. A plurality of people who noticed this whined. Apparently, the course shell has not been updated in 2 years.

The code snippets reference the P4E website, which is Dr. Chuck's open source version of the course. The links to the snippets should be given in the course shell, rather than requiring the student to navigate over to the P4E website, dive into the Resources area, then scan to find the snippet.

As one reviewer noticed, there are 2 questions in the Week 6 chapter quiz on REST, but no mention of REST in the lectures, and only a cursory mention of it in Chapter 13 of the text.

I also think that the GeoCoding example covered in the lecture videos needs to be broken down into steps. Perhaps it could be developed incrementally--showing the outputs generated and data structures used at each step. I ended up doing this myself, but I have significant prior knowledge.

There is also little use of functions in the course to-date. It might be good to enforce that as a precept of modular design and to inculcate good habits.

I used https://repl.it throughout the course, despite the recommendation that students invoke Python from the shell and use the platform agnostic Atom editor. Repl is a great learning tool and has a social component these days that has some of the collaboration functionality of forums like Slack. I think the course would run better this way.

Overall, this is one of the better classes on Python out there. I took an introductory Data Science oriented version of a Python course at Harvard and wish Dr. Chuck had been the instructor.

On to Course 4: Using Databases with Python...

jerald_cole @ alumni DOT harvard DOT edu

:-)

This third course applies and builds on the basic knowledge from the first two python courses. Especially interesting is the information on regular expressions, which kicks this course off. Following this the course gears up into a higher transmission focusing on using python with web browsers and reading webpages. Beautiful Soup gets covered as well as how to deal with XML data. So far so good.
Unfortunately the course loses itself suddenly in Java Script Object Notation and dealing with Twitter and Google Maps to the point where the amount of knowledge required does not match the content and quality of the classes.
Also ' dr. Chuck' seems more and more concerned with his self-promotion in the bonus video material that is provided each week, rather than focusing only on content. The age of the material (the course was ' shot' in 2015) also starts to show with the assignments that often lack sufficient information for students with English as a second language or jump into a level of complexity that is possible more than the basic student can understand.

I began learning Python with this course. With absolutely no prior knowledge of or experience in Python (except lots of curiosity), I came across the first two courses on Coursera.org and loved Dr Charles' videos. It's a well structured course, especially if you have just started learning about Python and wish to build your skills more practically than by mere reading of numerous resources. There are plenty of resources that Dr Chuck (as he is fondly referred to by his students) offers in the duration of the course. I especially enjoy the bonus videos that accompany this course. They really help increase your knowledge base and urge you to know and be better and try your hand at various things. I'm glad I decided to pursue the entire specialization offered by University of Michigan, and it is all thanks to Dr. Chuck!

That is a fantastic course! Dr. Chuck (Charles Severance) does a great job of making complex topics like network protocols and data serialization feel approachable for beginners.

Here is a structured review you can use, broken down by the key concepts covered in those quiz questions.

📝 Course Review: Using Python to Access Web Data
Overview
This course is a deep dive into how Python acts as a "client" to interact with the world across a network. It moves beyond basic data structures and shows you how to pull data from APIs, parse web pages (scraping), and handle various data formats.

Key Learning Pillars
Regular Expressions (Regex): Learning to "find" and "extract" specific strings from messy piles of text.

Network Protocols: Understanding the Request/Response cycle (HTTP) and how the "pipes" of the internet work.

Data Formats (XML & JSON): This is where those quiz questions come in. You learn how to translate internet data into Python-readable formats like lists and dictionaries.

APIs and Security: Understanding how companies like Google or Twitter share data using RESTful approaches and securing that data via OAuth.

What Makes It Great
Practicality: You aren't just writing "Hello World"; you are writing code that fetches real-time data from the web.

The "Dr. Chuck" Effect: His teaching style is conversational and focuses on the why as much as the how.

Bridge to Data Science: This course is the essential middle step between "knowing Python" and "doing Data Science," as it teaches you how to gather your own data.

Advice for Students
Pay close attention to Question 6 from your quiz. Navigating nested data structures (lists inside dictionaries inside lists) is the most common "stumbling block" in the course assignments. If you can master how to follow the path through the JSON tree, the rest of the course will be much smoother!

This being the 3 of 5 courses in this specialization I understand that we are gradually increasing the difficulty and knowledge base we should be using. With that being said I do not feel as if this course was planned well. The first two courses I felt that I could do with what was taught through the lessons and in the textbook with some trial and error. With the assignments in this course I would get to the assignment and have no idea how I was supposed to accomplish the goal of the assignment. With hours of researching and trial and error I was finding it impossible to complete the assignments with the lesson plan provided. It truly disappointed me when I completed the last three weeks with no idea of how it was supposed to be done. I feel as if it was rushed and should have had more examples in the videos instead of explaining how some of them are used in the real world. In the last week there is a two minute video of Dr. Chuck explaining how hotels, airlines, and car rental companies share info. I get that it could help someone get what he was going for, but when it came to actually doing the assignments, I wished that the time he spent explaining that was showing us more than just the google maps and twitter example. In one of the final assignments we needed to go into the dictionary that was inside of a dictionary and I attempted to replicate what was shown online (not in this class) and wasn't able to work it out.

To summarize this, the first two courses were taught well and the pace of the course was perfect. This course felt like the lesson plan was rushed and did not help me, and judging by the other discussion posts not many other students either.

It is hard for me to give this anything lower than 5 stars since I'm truly learning much more than I otherwise would have from this course. I can only speak as a learner and not as an educational institution or teacher. With that said, I do understand some of the reviews where it kind of drops you off a cliff and hope that you can work with what they gave you to land safely.

What really worked for me is slowing down and understanding what the code is telling me piece by piece. For the last part, the urllib.parse.encode(parms) function is really just adding a string of key: value pairs to the end of the url, and while that might not mean anything to some reading this, it was a "aha" moment for me. Learning that a lot of this was finding a bunch of ways to display and manipulate key:value pairs really helped me understand some of what seemed to be "jargon".

After knowing that, I realized that other folks have made it REALLY easy with internal programs like "json" and "urllib" to do a lot of the clean-up work for us so we can read and crawl through these webpages just like we would the lists/dictionaries that we make on our own.

I also wrote everything in VSCode in a Jupyter Notebook with language support, so it allowed me to hover over each part of code and it could tell me a short description of what was going on at each part. The Notebook format allowed me to print pieces of code at a time without having to run an entire file. This definitely helped when requesting urls over and over again through Google geocode.

I would say from the very start of the specialization, it is really, really helpful to slow down and understand what is going on and not just be satisfied with an accepted output. I did not have much Python experience at all before this course and it definitely helps to look at a few introductory courses before/after this one. That said, after most assignments I've experimented and tried writing my own code to see if I get the same results. Sometimes my code was a little better/shorter. In fact my only problem really was Chuck's use of variable names. Almost none of my variables look like his at all. There was actually an "input" variable he uses in one of the code3 zip files and interferes with the "input()" function and it's atrocious.

Besides that light-hearted nitpick, I feel that I definitely learned a lot here. I feel confident moving forward with python and web development after doing the assignments. It makes sense.

The 3 installment of the specialization deals with getting, parsing and reading data from the internet, specifically data in XML and JSON formats.

In comparison with the previous 2 chapters, this one feels quite rushed and overwhelming. Now, I completely understand that it's not possible to explain every single thing in a beginner's course, historically and functionality wise but I couldn't help feeling a bit dumb having to copy-paste some import statements in order to complete the assignments.

There's a lot more to talk about on the topic and I fully agree that the content has to be shrunk to a minimum in order to give a high-level overview of the subject but it could be of great help to the course if there were more assignments, more worked exercises, more lectures that go in further detail.

In the final part of the course, the examples are of reading data from Twitter and Google Maps. In theory, it sounds great and exciting, but in reality, I think it's an overkill for the purpose of the course. There's just too much stuff for a complete noob such as myself. Just a month ago, we were learning what's a dictionary and now we're going through nested dictionaries within lists within dictionaries... quite the jump. Adding to this - explaining what's an API is not done good enough. I only know what APIs do because in work in a SaaS company. If I only had the explanation the course provides, I would be immensely confused.

I'm not trying to say programming is easy, not at all. This particular course though can be done better, so it's easier for students to follow, I'm sure.

As usual, Dr. Chruck is great and it's a pleasure to have him as the tutor here.

I'll continue with the specialization and I hope course 4 will be structured better than this one. :)

Cheers and good luck!