The potential of the course material is great. it certainly expose the student to a range of topics.

The potential of the course is reduced significantly however by the labs. They have poor specifications and leave the student to 'discover' how to complete labs. In the early labs it's just a cut and paste to make things work, but in the later labs its the lack of objective specifications that makes them difficult ....not the material covered.

The capstone lab in particular is a reasonable challenge in itself, but made incredibly more challenging (read, it requires multiple attempts just to find out what is required in the answer) because of the lack of specification.

Do I think it's a worthwhile course? Yes, because it makes you think through a learning path.

Do I think it's a good course? Not so much since the learning objectives are very much left to the student to discover almost by accident.

Disappointed as this did not meet my expectations as a Google Company backed course. This would have been great as a free course by a first time teacher. But for a course backed by a great company this did not meet what I expected. It was sloppy really. First the instructor made a series of political statements unrelated to learning Python. Second the instructor would not stop making really childish puns. Both of these things were unnecessary and not what I expected from a professional course. Worse the labs were really terrible and I felt that they were not proof read by folks at Google. Another frustration is the videos are almost 100% showing the instructor talking. They only flash the code very briefly on the screen meaning you will be pausing and rewinding the videos consistently just to see the sample code long enough to read it. In the end the course met the syllabus but not up to the Google name and not worth the price I paid compared to other free learning out there.

the labs are sometimes frustrating because it does not give you feedback on what you are doing wrong. it just says you did not pass. it may take hours before you figure that small thing.

Not for beginners too complicated too costly

May be the worst instructor in the google

Week 2 of this course is pretty bad. The difficulty increases dramatically for topics that could be explained better. This was the first week where I learned more from the forums than I did from the course material. Then the Practice Quiz for Reading & Writing CSV Files seems to always return an error of 'Something went wrong! Contact Coursera Support about this question!" which results in a failure for the quiz. It appears that this has been an issue for a while but has not been resolved and contacting Coursera Support isn't very straightforward.

I was honestly enjoying this program until week 2 of this course. Please do better.

The final assignment is way too hard because there's not enough time to do the three exercises and write the actual code for the graded part. In addition there's only 5 points so it's basically pass or fail. Also the dictionary sorting code they provide you will not work unless you're copying to a new dictionary (which they don't explain to you). Oh and you have to encase the sorted statement in a dict() function for that, which they don't tell you. I ended up not using the operator module at all and just doing the sort when outputting to csv. Oh and if you write the code for the exercise perfectly and are not getting any points it's because you have to do the creation and conversion of the user_emails.csv in exercise 2 so you can't skip that.

In starting five weeks , all answers were directly provided and week 6 and 7 were very tough. So i suggest to equalize the toughness level in all weeks ,ie, no direct spoon feed nor abrupt toughness

Final project is too hard for things learned in the course and the platform uses different python version from what we learned.

Disappointment! Course is abandoned by its authors.

Essence of the lab help is in the excerpt below, taken from the Discussion Forum.

"...the support guy from QwikLabs just gave me his solution code and asked to replace the username with mine. This is the code, posting here for reference [NOT MINE]."

What is the point of this certificate?

Forum moderators have only one answer: "here is a correct code for this task".

Labs 1-6 are simply copy/paste. The code you are supposed to write is given at the bottom of the page.

Students (apparently proud of their achievement) post the code that let them complete an assignment. Code is lame and frequently contains multiple errors. Why? One of the reasons is in the dialog below:

= May I ask how did you copy the code out from the VM?

= Line by line my friend, i wrote it all again.

Well, here comes the hint: use WinSCP or scp.

I am going through another Python course (not from Google) and believe me it takes time and effort to come up with a working code. Guys have a Telegram canal to support. Any posts from students that contain a hint are deleted. Suggested solution (from instructors) is revealed only when the test is passed. This is there you see how lame your code is and how elegant it should be.

Google course is very far from that.

***Not recommended for those without knowledge of Linux system***

1. Never taught us 'how and where' to install Linux system especially I am a Windows user and never experienced how exactly Linux works - It should have tutorial on how to install Linux especially you stated "No prior experience required" on the enrollment page!

2. No .py files provided or no additional buttons to download the .py files that used in the tutorials (also never taught how to create a .py file, you have to figure it out and create your own). The instructor straight loaded the .py file onto his Linux system and says "GREAT", "YEAHHH", "If you don't understand, don't worry just rewatch the videos or check it out on the discussion forum blah x3" 😓

This course touches upon a lot of topics. It covers them in breadth rather than depth. I experienced a huge transition coming from the previous course, Crash Course on Python, in terms of difficulty. It covers so many topics that at times, I felt confused about understanding the interconnection between them.

Regular Expressions was explained best, wherein elaborate explanations were provided. The week on Automating Testing Using Python felt a bit rushed.

A major downside of this course is the Qwiklabs platform, which is also its major upside (we don't need to install any software locally to navigate through the course). However, there are discrepancies in the lab instructions and how the grader evaluates your submission on Qwiklabs. In week 7, I wasted 2 days on Qwiklabs with multiple interactions with the Qwiklabs Customer Support.

Overall, I would recommend this course.

Most labs were just copy and paste exercises. Final project didn't have enough feedback from Qwiklabs to troubleshoot -- there was one checkpoint that basically said "Something is wrong". Finishing required copy/pasting data into a .csv file that is used nowhere else in the rest of the project.

Not pleased with the challenge of using my own machine, and having to be kept to the arbitrary 1.5 hours of the Qwiklabs. Some of us need more time to work through stuff and to try different approaches. That "nano" IDE is horrendous - I can't figure out how to copy and paste, and moving that damned cursor is crazy. We need the option of working all this stuff out on our own machine, and then copying it into the Qwiklabs.

I struggled a little but enjoyed it a lot. Learned a lot of new things and also some of the courses are quite confusing and challenging to learn.But good knowledge to learn.

I'm really appreciated from Google for providing this course and really appreciated the course instructor "Roger" he is very cool guy, and after all i want to thank Course era organization which gives the chance for learners who want to gain success.

Great course! I had some previous knowledge, but this was perfect to fill in the gaps. Also, unit testing was completely new to me and will be very useful in future projects. Thanks for making this!

The course really came together in weeks six and seven, but the reading materials in weeks 1-5 were lackluster, containing one or two links without context, pointing to a narrow topic of that week.

I wasted to much time for research, I want to spend time learning right now, not researching by myself

Lots of blabla ...not straight to the point...boring

This course covers most of general concepts of automation, testing, regular expressions, and much more. Personally I will use these skills everyday because I deal with log files and this course helped me to actually work with them efficiently. Thanks Google

Definitely a course you need to take. Not easy but that's the point, depending on your knowledge you might start slow on the first lessons but at the end you'll be amaze on how natural you code.

This course I particularly enjoyed more. It was very relevant and hand on. I know with Google's authority now how to make the computer do my bidding. Thank you all for this course.

If you want to kill your curiosity after completing your Introduction to Python, this is absolutely the course.

On last lab server isn't updated yet. The error is kind of frustrating.

Overall you need to move labs to your PC to have more time.

Taught me alot about using regex pattern recognition, although I still recommend books and external source as a suppliment. There will be frustrations like regex only takes in string, I figured a long time why a tuple won't work etc.

It took me about 12 hours to finish the last lab.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52404656/sre-sre-match-object-is-not-subscriptable

Weeks 1-5: copy-past, cheat-sheet = cheat-shit.

Weeks 6-7: omg wtf + python 3.5 instead of 3.6 or later.

If your regex groups like smth[1] aren't working, replace it with smth.group(1).

Also, exercise 3 in week 7 is necessary (not obvious).