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).

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.

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!

Really enjoyed this class. As always enjoy Dr. Chuck and his teaching, most excellent! I started out knowing nothing about programming any language and had only heard of Python a few times in life. Now I am enjoying it more and more. Retrieving data from web pages or other sources is just an amazing thing to learn and can become a useful tool to have in everyday life. I find myself whether it be in my finances or expenditures trying to write a python program to find a specific piece of data. I keep spreadsheets of everything which also helps me practice a lot with. So thank you Coursera for making Python Programming available to everyone and thank you Dr. Chuck for your love of the subject itself helping people like myself also enjoy it. I can not wait to take the next class. I am almost there and I will see this through to completion. Thank you!

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.

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.

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.

Could have been better explained. The first two courses were thorough and in depth, I actually learned in those, in this course I feel like I had to look for external sources for help and more explanation. One to two videos per topic for things that could be taught in a whole course or multiple courses was difficult and then dealing with the assignments made it harder because if you got it wrong you just had to try to find out why without really having much to look at. For instance, one of my files was named socket.py and everytime I ran my code I received an error saying circular import or something like that which as a new student made no sense to me. Had to look online for over an hour to figure out that when this error occurs you probably have a file that is named something that it shouldn't be named... May not be the professor's fault could just be my own ignorance, but as a beginner these things are frustrating when you have the correct code but little things like that cause so much trouble