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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Java Programming: Solving Problems with Software by Duke University

4.6
stars
7,951 ratings

About the Course

Learn to code in Java and improve your programming and problem-solving skills. You will learn to design algorithms as well as develop and debug programs. Using custom open-source classes, you will write programs that access and transform images, websites, and other types of data. At the end of the course you will build a program that determines the popularity of different baby names in the US over time by analyzing comma separated value (CSV) files. After completing this course you will be able to: 1. Edit, compile, and run a Java program; 2. Use conditionals and loops in a Java program; 3. Use Java API documentation in writing programs. 4. Debug a Java program using the scientific method; 5. Write a Java method to solve a specific problem; 6. Develop a set of test cases as part of developing a program; 7. Create a class with multiple methods that work together to solve a problem; and 8. Use divide-and-conquer design techniques for a program that uses multiple methods....

Top reviews

FA

Oct 7, 2017

Excellent explanations and amount of course work for practice, the tests made good use of the examples and work given, I am satisfied with what I learned in this course and see it's real world usage.

AS

Dec 10, 2020

Excellent explanations and amount of course work for practice, the tests made good use of the examples and work given, I am satisfied with what I learned in this course and see it's real world usage.

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1551 - 1575 of 1,636 Reviews for Java Programming: Solving Problems with Software

By HEMANTH Y

Feb 19, 2020

I'm unable to understand the tutor language... I feel like they are going fast and I'm unable to catch them.

sorry and I don't want to continue this course anymore.

By Soumyamoy D

Jul 1, 2020

It would be better if Java was taught from the scratch with syntax and semantics, instead of using BlueJ and external packages at the first instant only.

By Antonio B R

Sep 13, 2020

Way too repetitive. It gets extremely boring doing basically the same tasks with Strings over and over and over and over again. And then some more.

By Jerrold

Oct 7, 2020

Fantastic course. Great assignments and lectures. Low score because the workload is excessively high and overwhelming for novice programmers

By Shachi P

Aug 22, 2016

This course is really hard, and I am having ALOT trouble understanding it. Overall, it is not one of the best courses I have taken.

By Camino E

Sep 4, 2023

Hard to understand, poorly explained concepts, own-class oriented, a big deception and a waste of time and money.

By CW C

Mar 29, 2020

Not a very good course for Java. The introduction in week 1 is taught roughly.

By y C

Mar 10, 2019

I do not think it is helpful enough.

It just tells lots of basic things.

By Ng W L

Jul 24, 2020

hard to get help, its not very beginner friendly..

By Farhan H P

Aug 15, 2020

This Course does not cover the Java Basics at all

By Adelajda K

Dec 3, 2020

The lessons are not easy to catch for a beginner

By Sireesha C

Oct 4, 2020

Videos are not okay. Could be more explanatory.

By Yonas S

Jan 28, 2023

nobody to help with IDE problems!

By Arogya D

Jun 5, 2023

vrey poorly made

By Mackmin M

Sep 15, 2021

Very challenging

By Richard C

Sep 22, 2022

I really want to know if the people giving this course glowing reviews are real people that have taken other programming courses on Coursera. I've done a bunch, and this may be the worst one that I've seen. It's definitely not accessible to beginners. If you can't already program well in another language, this will be unintelligible to you.

The lectures are super easy to follow because they are written like they were designed for audiences of small children. As soon as you go and try to do the assignments, you'll notice that they are very difficult and that watching the videos (even multiple times) does nothing to prepare you for what you are doing. Even the first exercise is brutally hard if you don't already know what you are doing with respect to object oriented programmings patterns. They give you a big file with some prewritten functions and then expect you to be able to write several functions to solve increasingly more complex problems based on the methods from their custom class. There's a very good chance that you'll look at it and just stare blankly because nothing prepares you for what you are expected to do.

The big issue that I can't get over is that although I can sort of stumble my way through things, I don't feel like the course explains how and why things work the way that they do. Why am I doing [insert whatever task]? I have no idea really.

When you realize that you have no idea what is going on, you'll go into the forum and notice that every question you have has been asked by multiple people already, often going back several years. It's obvious that nobody maintains or looks at these discussion forums.

Everyone else has pointed it out, but it's worth saying again: BlueJ is terrible. Why one earth would you force people to use an IDE that nobody else uses? Being forced to use BlueJ alone is a reason to not finish this course. Just don't do it--it's awful.

I also think it's terrible to write custom classes for a course and then make the course completely dependent on them. Why do courses do this? It literally makes most of what we are doing useless outside of the class.

By Jessecca S

Nov 29, 2021

This corse was horrible. I tried very hard for a few months to grasp the concepts and learn at the pace that was required. However, even with a small amount of programming experience, these courses made little to no sense. Also, the duration of the courses was WAY off, I work a full time job, so I was excited about taking this class in my free time after work and for an hour or two on the weekends. However, I found that I had to set aside at least 3-4 hours EACH DAY to accomplish the tasks and try to squeeze information out of instructional videos that just wasn't there. The instructors overcomplicate topics, while speaking in a tone as if they are talking to children. Some of the information that was mentioned I could not find anywhere else online, so I was stuck trying to take notes from the readings and videos, only to get to the quiz and NOTHING lines up with what was taught. They attempt to teach you from the ground up, however, they jump around from topic to topic to where it's impossible to feel like you're actually building on what you have previously learned. Even when I felt like I understood SOME of the information, the quizzes made me feel like a complete failure as the questions and answers are vague.

By Awase A

Nov 18, 2022

I came here from Udemy thinking that the courses here were better produced and easier to understand. Man was I wrong. Not only do these videos look dated (when were these videos made? 10 years ago), but the IDE they make you use looks like it was made in the 90s. The instructors DO NOT explain anything in detail, leaving me feeling even more confused than when the video started. Most videos are 5 minutes long and the instructor rushes through the topic almost like they don't want to be doing it. As for the readings, NO ONE learns coding through reading. But even if they did, the lectures you force the students to read are almost in a different language. If I need a dictionary and other YouTube videos to explain what I'm reading, then you've failed in your goal of teaching. When you expect me to pay $50 a month for a course, I expect better quality and production than what I can find for free on YouTube. To anyone reading this.... SAVE YOUR MONEY and find free stuff on YouTube, or pay $12-15 on Udemy and get better lectures from there. To anyone who made these video...DO BETTER! This low quality crap is why people get demoralized when they want to learn code and give up.

By Andrei K

Nov 3, 2024

1. This cousre hasn't been updated since 2014. That's a pitty 2. Instead of showing studenst how to work with common IDEs like Inellij of Eclipse for java, this course uses some minor unknown IDE. It is a dead end, you won't be very usefull if you don't use the same instruments as your potential colleagues. 3. All the tasks in this course could be solved with java built-in libraries and well-known third party libraries, but for some reason you have to use the proprietary libraries of the universtity. That is a dead end as well. You won't use this libraries in Your career. So I gueas it is simplification indeed, but You just learn unnecessary tools and DON'T learn the tools that for sure would be needed if You choose to be a Java programmer:(

By Ankur A

Nov 23, 2020

The problem instructions have errors or they are incomplete. I saw that students from 2-4 years ago asked the same questions which they were asking most recently about 1-2 months ago. I think the course staff has missed an opportunity here to improve the documentation and learning experience. Moreover the problem statements for the assignments are vague and ambiguous and you are left scratching your head and browsing through forum posts to figure out where you went wrong. Sorry to say, overall a frustrating experience. The challenge is not in problem solving & coding where is should be, but in trying to untangle confusing and incomplete assignment descriptions.

By YJ L

Nov 20, 2022

Constant mistakes appear in the lecture especially reading materials. it can mislead the students.

for example:"As always, when you’re done writing your code in the getLargestSide method, remember to add the code to call the getLargestSide method in the testPerimeter method and add the code to have the system print the output (the same way we did in the last exercise). As always, this is a great time to compile and test your code, and if you run this code using example1.txt as your shape file, then the longest side should be 5.0."

I think answer is not 5. mentor please double check. PS I've found several mistakes in this class. It needs to be improved.

By Irene A

Oct 11, 2023

I came here with a understanding of Java, and left absolutely bewildered by what they wanted me to actually accomplish. The lectures were okay, but usually just went on about something, leaving out details to "discuss later" but then need you to know about them to finish the assignments. They have you use things that are from their website, use the horrible code editor of BlueJay when VSCode has far wider use, with far wider companies. And the assignments simply throw you into the deep end with little help or discussions. I would say if you are a beginner, look elsewhere for learning, if you know Java you can try, but don't expect much.

By Esau O

May 15, 2020

This is not a beginner's course and some questions are not easy as the staff rated, I think is a good course for intermediate people. To answer all the quizzes section you might investigate a lot. We got a life too! Many of us are not in school anymore we have a job and a family. My recommendation, please explain a little more the programming structures like CSVParses is a list or something? I never got it.

PD: The way you use tricky questions is not good to improve programming skills, please put hint at least i.e. " What is the number of boys' names in the file yob1905.csv?"

Regards.

By Deleted A

Jan 1, 2018

I Just can't understand why the instructors make simple concepts difficult to understand. Take the example of functions video, why you need nesting of function, calling function inside a function when you explaining function for the first time. for God sake this course required no programming knowledge. I learned programming (10 years ago) and yet i am feeling difficulty to understand your complex definition and explanation of a simple language concepts. i am doing this course for the sake of DUKE Certificate otherwise i give this course 1 Star.

By Viktoriia A

Nov 1, 2015

The course is just terrible.

It leaves an impression of being unfinished. There's a lot of knowledge missed out from lectures while being expected from the student in the quizzes.

Lecturers themselves have a very vague understanding of how java works and how to code in real life. What they say in some lectures is very misleading and gives either false or just insufficient understanding of certain mechanisms.

The examples are overcomplicated. They demand a full concentration on domain knowledge rather than on programming itself.