IF YOU ARE NEW TO PROGRAMMING DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE!!!!!

Although the course description states that it is suitable for Python beginners, I am here to tell you it is NOT. They make you jump over and back to Code Academy at first, which I found very annoying as the Code Academy lessons were great and doable, but by the time I came back over to Coursera I had forgotten what they were talking about in the course. The texts that make up the main parts of the course, explain the biology parts very well, but I found the programming parts to be very badly explained using complex language. I would read it over and over again and still have no idea what they were trying to say. Perhaps text isn't the best medium for this course.

The jump in difficulty in exercises from CodeAcademy to this course was also *insane*. Idk HOW they expect us to have enough knowledge and experience to complete those exercises simply from the beginner python 2 course. It's just ridiculous. The comments are full of people complaining about the difficulty and others providing solutions. If it weren't for the comments I would not have finished this course.

Also a lot of the exercises, especially in unit three and four, require you to copy and paste a lot of the functions you've already written to use as subroutines. This becomes intensely frustrating trying to click back through your previous exercises to find them, or else you have to start keeping a document with all your functions in it to copy and paste.

I also disliked how they did not provide any hints if you got it wrong. Yes, I understand that's how debugging code works, it can be tedious and frustrating, etc, but for a so-called "beginner" course I think they should have provided some hint or maybe highlighted what you were getting wrong after a few attempts. It is very disheartening to get it wrong over and over with no offers of help and no idea how you can fix it.

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In summary I feel like this course would be great for programmers who want to get into bioinformatics. I think it would be very compelling and interesting then, but for biologists, it makes you want to pull out your hair in frustration. I appreciate that it is a free course and definitely a lot of time went into making it from the creators, but if you're a beginner at Python like me, I would *highly* recommend you to take a different course, or become very comfortable with Python before taking it.

Please be warned: You really need to know how Python works before taking this class. The suggested time frames for completion are absolutely insane for a true beginner. Week 1 suggests 4 hours, I'm a totall coding newbie and I've already spent at least 8 hours in Codecademy, which does not translate well to the Stepik tool. Guess I'll be eating this $49.

This course is really not for beginners, to be honest. It lacks the basic explanation and is frustrating at time as in when you aren't able to solve any problem

Not for beginners at all, lack of explanation.

An excellent course that is a great opportunity for anyone interested in bioinformatics, no previous experience is necessary but either a biological, mathematical or computing background will give you advantages in certain areas. Being a biologist I struggled at first and many of you may do the same but stick with it, work hard on it and you will be rewarded and it is incredibly satisfying.

Due to the practical coding nature of the course, each week can take up a lot of you time. Best if you have a few weeks free (e.g. a graduate student like me) so you can spend a few whole days of it but could be done before/after work if you are motivated and plug away at it each day - just something to keep in mind though, don't expect a light easy 1 hour a week course, it is intensive but in a good way. It can get frustrating, you will want to give up time and time again....but stick at it and you will have a shiny new Coursera certificate and a wealth of programming knowledge under your belt once you finish!

A massive two thumbs up for this course, one of the best ones out there that gives you real worthwhile skills that employers and academia want. Thanks to all the course staff for a great experience!

I give this course 5 star because I did Bioinformatics I and I totally enjoy it.

This is where programming can be fun, and practical, and you'll learn some basic biology too.

What's not to love?

The course was fairly interesting and I had a lot of fun in completing it. The only problem I had with the course was with its python aspect. Apart from that, it was amazing!

Although the course may introduce beginner based Bioinformatics and the overall coding is initially taught from a beginner level, it quickly evolves into a level of coding that I and many in the class did not understand given our lack of coding back ground. I would recommend taking a beginner python course followed by a basic data analytics with python course first. This is just so you can adequetly understand what youre doing with the data.

The professors of this course are very off-base on the amount of time each lesson will take each student. While suggesting the first lesson will take 10 minutes to complete, it in fact takes several hours and the comments on each chapter of the lesson shows that this is experienced by dozens of students who take the course. Additionally, the success rate of the "quizzes" in this course should be an indicator to the professors as to whether they are teaching the course in a beneficial or poor manner. A 28% pass rate on the quiz in the first lesson displays a failure of the professors to properly pass over the material to the students. What's more disappointing is that the professors seem to not check in whatsoever on this course: if they did, they would have immediately noticed that in the comments throughout the chapters many students are lost, and those that aren't are cleaning up the professors' mess and breaking down the material for the students who may look to the comments in the future for help. This course is awful.

This course is mislabeled as being for beginners, and the time investment is way too large. As a biologist, it takes way too much of my time doing the Codecademy lessons and then the lessons in Stepik, which are poorly structured.

This course is never ever for Beginners of Python. Very poor didactics. The explanations are very short. If you want be totally discouraged of programming, you should do this course. It's really bad teaching.

El curso estaba muy mal estructurado, deberían cambiarlo o removerlo por completo de la plataforma. Deceptionante.

Muy difícil para principiantes

Too little Python instruction

It is not for beginners

最后一个测试怎样都不能通过，呵呵

Really enjoyed the course. You will have to commit to learning python also. The class encourages you to build a module of programs but doesn't go into file input or some other useful things. There is a referral to a free version of a python 2.7 tutorial. Most will prefer python 3 but you will have to build your own knowledge path. The course is great if you are coming from other python courses like python for everyone courses 1 and 2 or almost any other python course where you have done file processing, for-loops, while loops, used strings, list, and dictionaries, and switched between them. I wanted to find some courses to test my python knowledge and build some python projects. You might need other courses if you want to learn a lot about biology or microbiology. Viewed in that like you will binge.

Coming from a Computer Science background this course is very interesting and relatable. The coding part is pretty easy, so if you are familiar with any programming language, I think the programming part will be easy for you. I definitely recommend this course to anyone familiar with programming, who is also interested in the bioengineering aspect!

That being said, I like the idea of the course, but I encountered some issues with stepik's online classes/texts.. Their servers seem to be down so I am not even able to complete the interactive text part at the time I want (I keep getting 500).. I was expecting something more reliable especially since this is not free .. But again the idea is cool just wish there were no down times

It is not an easy course. I mean given that if you aren't as fast a learner as some others, you might take alot more time to try to understand the concepts both of the programming and why you are using certain methods to solve a certain biological problem. I had to also rely on other sources online to help me understand some parts of the python programming and to reinforce some concepts but I think this is given as I really have no clue! It is a huge undertaking for these course instructors to try to create a short enough yet comprehensive program and I think they have done exceptionally well especially with the abundant practice (coding) material (yes you have to work hard on these, but it does pay off). Thank you so much!

I have learnt so much from this course and realized how powerful bioinformatics can be. I would like to thank the authors for such a creative approach that kept me excited throughout the whole course.

Although I am so happy to have taken the course, I struggled so much during the practical part. I wish somebody stopped me and told me to first take some Python programming courses. So, for the future learners with no computer science backgorund, I highly recommend to get comfortable with Python programming before starting the course, although it says that no previous knowledge of programming is needed to start it... This will make your learning experience more enjoyable!

My major is biotechnology, I have learnt C program before and I quite enjoy programming, but my major courses have nearly nothing to do with programming, which made me worried about the waste of my knowledge. But now, I feel so excited and refreshed, cause I have learnt how to connect both subjects! And I want to say that this course is very clear with beautiful illustrations and has lots of expansion which can lead us to continue further study, though I have a problem that I can't watch the teaching video, what a pity~

And I'll definitely continue the following course: Bioinformatics Specialization!!!

I really enjoyed this course! That's why I will definitely dive into the Bioinformatics Specialization. The presented material is well explained and the coding challenges are increasingly demanding and motivationally designed. Furthermore the instructors are always helpful pointing in the right direction without revealing too much.

Maybe a little advice: If you are completely new to programming or biology (or perhaps both) be prepaed to spend more than 4 h/week because you'll propably need more training time.

The course provides some meaningful questions in biological context (rather than abstact excercises in some textbooks) for you to solve. It is really fulfilling when you put what you learnt into use and made improvements on your code to solve the questions better. The exercises are actually challenging for programming beginners. But if you persist, upon completion of this course you will find youself equipped with some solid knowledge on bioinformatics, which will definitely benefit your future career.

This course gave me the glimpse of what programming actually do to the biological data, such as nucleotides. However, if anyone with no coding experience (like me) wants to learn coding, I suggest you to also take another coding course. This course would refer us to codecademy, which I felt enough for me to understand the basics, but maybe not for anyone who wants more into coding. Overall, great course! Thankyou for making this course very organized and enjoyable.

Quite difficult for a biologist since it requires knowledge of basic programming. Anyway good topic to explore and excel in this field as it a booming field of science however it would be more interesting if we had more of the video lessons first instead of keeping it as optional since that requires a lot of understanding too. Thank you for this course it has really inspired to explore this field and i hope i be able to pursue a career relating to this