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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Data Collection and Processing with Python by University of Michigan

4.7
stars
3,870 ratings

About the Course

This course teaches you to fetch and process data from services on the Internet. It covers Python list comprehensions and provides opportunities to practice extracting from and processing deeply nested data. You'll also learn how to use the Python requests module to interact with REST APIs and what to look for in documentation of those APIs. For the final project, you will construct a “tag recommender” for the flickr photo sharing site. The course is well-suited for you if you have already taken the "Python Basics" and "Python Functions, Files, and Dictionaries" courses (courses 1 and 2 of the Python 3 Programming Specialization). If you are already familiar with Python fundamentals but want practice at retrieving and processing complex nested data from Internet services, you can also benefit from this course without taking the previous two. This is the third of five courses in the Python 3 Programming Specialization....

Top reviews

AG

Jul 9, 2020

Very interesting and fine course, in this course I learn how to solve Nested data and new a new thing i.e REST API which seems best in course 3 now I am excited about course 4. Thanking you Michigan

CM

Oct 9, 2019

This was a really excellent course. The functional project at the end helped me understand how recommendation systems work and now I'm very excited to try to build a similar system for books I love.

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1 - 25 of 675 Reviews for Data Collection and Processing with Python

By Semant J P

May 24, 2019

The first two weeks were fine. Week 3 was a struggle to get through. I couldn't figure out why all of a sudden we were dealing with APIs. The instructors did go through the material which was tested but I would appreciated an even slower pace. Compared to the previous 2 courses (in this Python3 specialization), Course 3 Week 3 was a grind and I just wanted it over and done with. As usual, the final project requires a lot of scanning around in the forums to figure out how to do things.

By Mark G

Jan 30, 2019

The final project allowed me to get a 100% grade even though i did not finish question #6. Over the past week there has been little to no response concerning questions about the course related to problems with the final project.

By Dixant B S

Apr 20, 2020

The final course work is hard to complete, not because it is a difficult assignment, but because:

1) The runestone is so buggy. It kept giving me errors when I completed one question. I copied the answer, opened the runestone in a different tab, pasted the same answer and then finally the answer was marked as correct. Same thing happened every stage of every question. It's difficult to answer questions when you can't see whats happening, and then there's the buggy software that just adds salt on the wound.

2) The "Cache" pages are fine and well written, but the questions are very confusing to understand for someone who is new to Python, let alone APIs. Videos to explain what the question means and a few examples of what the output should be like would be much appreciated.

By yaacov t

Jan 30, 2019

Runestone project was buggy and added hours to work to complete

By Alexander A

Apr 30, 2020

This course and the balance of courses 1-4 of the specialization were fantastic - I would highly recommend each. Course 5 (the capstone project) was an abomination. Basically zero instruction / guidance and very frustrating for anybody except decently experienced programmers. If courses 1-4 are your only exposure to Python, you could easily spend a month or more on this project. If getting the Specialization Certificate is very important to you, there are resources online that you can leverage to complete the project but that is done largely at the expense of any real learning, so I really hope UofM comes up with an alternative final project that is more consistent with the level of expertise attained in courses 1-5 (maybe something on implementing classic algorithms?).

By Sufyan S

Aug 28, 2019

Excellent course which teaches how to process request, extract and process Internet data in a simple and step by step approach. I have gained invaluable skills how to handle large data with Python

By Hanno H

Apr 20, 2020

In itself, a good course. If you want to take this course, I recommend it. If you are, however, taking this entire specialization I suggest you walk away. The final course (course 5) is a course by someone who has not been lecturing in the course, presenting something they obviously are very fond of. The course work is, and I quote, "a project with minimal scaffolding. Expect to use the the discussion forums to gain insights! It’s not cheating to ask others for opinions or perspectives". In other words, part of the learning target is to work through bad or incomplete documentation and to solve an exercise that is stated without providing the information you need to solve it. Unless someone else already went through the moves, the lecturer fully expects you to fail by yourself.

If I wanted to feel the pain of learning without help or instructions, I would have just worked with the online manuals ... which is what this exercise openly tells you they want you to do. Its a shame for the other 4 courses, which are well done and have passionate lecturers.

By Noland J B

Jan 2, 2020

I have recommendation this courses to several friends and colleagues, and will continue to do so. I have learned a lot from this course, as I did with the previous two. The quality of the presentation and material are of the highest standards.

I preferred to do the examples and exercises in a Python environment, instead of the Runestone text book. However, for Course 3, I ran into the following issues I could not overcome (as yet):

The requests_with_caching module get() function consistently gave the following error:

'TypeError: __init__() takes 1 positional argument but 3 were given'

in Python 3.6.3 with Spyder/Jupyter Notebook

2. Also, I could not get 'from requests_with_caching import get" to import in Python 3.6.3 with Jupyter Notebook.

By ashirwad s

Jan 16, 2019

Reading content is awesome. Videos are little bit boring. But it's okay when you get to learn so much.

By Akash B

Mar 4, 2019

Basically the video lecture was only good, but i think projects should be more challenging rather than to just run on runestone environment, The difficulty level of project should be increased in terms of a real project situation where in this course a user should be able to select his/her own api style given from a list, and moreover this course should encourage searching and tackling some real probelms.

They didn't even mentioned it to put on it to github. This project isn't that enough to be a part of git repo though.

But Overall this course is nice, just after completing the course, anyone should be able to try to think out of the box and do more out of it to prove the worth of your time spent in this course.Thank you.

By Tomohiko M

Apr 20, 2020

I love the course part 1, and 2. they are understandable and following the textbook. However, from part3 to 5, I was disappointed with the gap between the courses.- they are unclear and less practice.

By Julian M

May 31, 2020

Not nearly enough practice and hence not worth the money. You learn how to code by practicing, not by watching others code...

By Luciana M G

Feb 6, 2019

This course is part 3 of a 5-course Specialization on Python 3. It is an excellent course. Courses 1 and 2 start at a very basic level but as the courses progress, the challenges improve and it gets actually quite interesting. The instructors have provided a valuable amount of exercises for us to practice. Prof. Resnick and his assistants are excellent instructors and you get bonus jokes at the end of each week, which I loved. Thank you all for creating this amazing specialization.

By Stephen T

Nov 14, 2019

Very well organized instruction and materials. Content and skills are introduced incrementally allowing participant to develop practical skill in their use. In addition, there are practice and reinforcement learning opportunities to help you firmly root the skill in your memory. [Former public school teacher]

By Jason D

Jun 27, 2019

This course really helped me enhance my programming skills in Python. It teaches the more "Pythonic" way of coding. REST APIs are also very important and challenging, and this course guides you through that topic wonderfully. Definitely a must for those who love coding.

By Sayantan S

Aug 22, 2019

Awesome content and guidance with top of the line applications for application of knowledge acquired throughout the course. It covers the basics and then implements higher order topics over them.

By Nour M

Sep 26, 2021

Thanks a lot for this great course

By Raúl E P

Jun 10, 2020

I think it is a very nice course, well explained. My only issue is that they use a interface (Runestone) to do problems and exams. Although this interface is very nice to do exercises and practice, it is really bad when you have to do complex things. I also think that apart from the practics, which is a really nice tool, they should also teach us how to work in the real word using python from our computer and not through the lens of a custom-built interface.

By Yanina

Feb 2, 2020

There is some problems with the caching in the Final Project. I have to use https://fopp.umsi.education/runestone/assignments/doAssignment?assignment_id=24 instead https://fopp.umsi.education/assignments/doAssignment?assignment_id=24

By Liu W

Mar 26, 2020

The tool is TERRIBLE!!! To much bugs that waste tons of times!!!

Fine, then, except for the tool, everything else of the course is fine. But the course is DEFINITELY NOT for beginners. At lease take a basic python course before this one.

By Scott C

Aug 12, 2019

This would be much better if you could use an external IDE. The final project wasn't realistic because we were stuck using the Runestone code window which makes it very difficult to code as you would in a real job.

By Steven S

Nov 29, 2019

The course material was decent enough, but the final project had some glaring issues which could potentially be a time waster. For those taking the course, make sure you access the final project via Coursera, and not by clicking next on the Runestone textbook. It turns out these lead to 2 different links with the Runestone version being outdated. It took a lot of forum digging to find this out, and some have reported spending 7 days on this issue.

By Bence B

Jun 8, 2020

Claimed it is an intermediate course. However, it was rather a beginner one. For a beginner a good one. I did not understood how the traceroute and the whole routing part is related to Python API calls. I think that is out of topic.

By Jorge A L D

Aug 18, 2020

Awful experience with the last assignment, must fix all the Runestone bugs as soon as possible!

By Wentao T

May 9, 2020

the last part of the project has problem, which the website needs ai=pikey