nice course

I will put it like this, you will learn the ggplot2 package to a decent extent if you go all out reading the materials and learning the in betweens for the inner workings of the package (without cheating). You will learn a thing or two about the ggproto classes used to build all of the little geometries used to make those cool plots you've read about and how to use the stats, geometries, and grid layers to make your own graphics. This part of the R ecosystem (ggplot2 and grid) has a lot of missing parts that should be documented. For example, you'd think you could add ggproto classes together since that's how the ggplot2 syntax works, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. And this is just one of many little edge cases you learn through trial and error. You will lose your head trying to understand how ggplot2::layer and ggplot2::ggproto behave in the edge cases, but you'll learn a lot in the process.

I learned ggplot2 more than I think I ever wanted to. The book does a decent introduction to the graphics ecosystem for ggplot2, but it's not enough. Use browseVignettes("ggplot2") to assist you because the book is simply not enough to finish the last assignment. You'll get proficient at this graphics language, but this has less use than the other courses in this specialization. And grading is peer based, just to warn you, post your shareable link in the forums if you want a timely response for your certificate.

So first of all, the material for this course in the bookdown document are very good - well structured, with good sources. My concern is that the Coursera course does not go a lot beyond, basically just referring to the document and adding quizzes + graded assignment in the last week. The assignment, however, is nice and challenging and requires people to understand the materials.

Also, the course covers other great packages than ggplot2, e.g. plotly and leaflet and methods for handling spatial data. I think it would be very nice if the students were challenged in these topics as well and evaluate them in a better way than just a quiz (programming assignment for instance).

I liked the course though and I believe it can be prepared even better.

This course is not as satisfactory as the second one, "Advanced R Programming". You spend most of the time reading the book they wrote. There is no video lecture or interactive quiz. The most annoying part is the peer-reviewed assignment part. This is a coding project where you need to create your own geom. I understand that building your own geom is an advanced topic in visualization using R. However, at least for me, I rarely have this need in my work. The example and the dataset they use for the project isn't very interesting neither. Overall, I think this course should not be included in the specialization.

Content on ggplot2 framework is solid. However, no video or explanation to complement the textbook, students are expected to learn by reading solely.

Final assignment requires prior R programming knowledge, which is not taught in this course. This can lead to frustration in the end. Probably those who are enrolled in the entire specialization will find this assignment more manageable. I personally had to spend more than 20 hours on this supposedly 4-hour assignment.

You'll learn how to make a custom geom, and apply what you learned to an interesting dataset.

This course has though an insane difficulty level, mostly because you don't have the information you'd need to succeed easily. I'd only recommand this course to people following the entire R specialization: if your goal is to learn how to make a custom ggplot, follow an external tutorial, you'll avoid being frustrated.

This course was a massive struggle. I gave up on it for two months as I just found the package development for the geom to be way over my head. Definitely learning a lot, but

I wish there were videos and not just reading a website but the content is really top notch. I will definitely be using what I've learned in the future.

The way last exam is presented makes student lean towards unconcise programming

This course needs updates.

The peer-reviewed assign

This course was the reason why I started learning other courses in this specialization.

The reading material covers basic ggplot2 and ggmap elements, which would be empirically helpful. However, final assignment was not to my expectation. (Though understandable)

Hope the team would change the assignment to non-peer-grading one. Getting it reviewed seems pretty harsh.

Apart from the book the courses does not offer me anything. No videos, no active forum, no explanation. Also the assessment is not interesting and there is no much information in the teaching material in order to be able to do the assessment.

I am very disappointed with this Specialization.

The designers of this course designed a final assignment that is way beyond the curriculum leading up to it, and judging from the discussion forums it gives everyone severe headaches to deal with it. They know of the situation, but rather than alter the assignment they just added new "lessons" that boil down to "Why don't you go read some more material in this other person's book about creating graphical elements? You'll be fine!" I am paying to take this course so I'm more than a little ticked off about this. Until they fix the situation you should take some other series of courses to learn about R programming.

just links to a webpage... no support from the mentors no support form coursera... you can use your money more wisely..

Some useful stuff, but you could be waiting weeks if not months to have your final assignment graded.

Obtuse and doesn't give enough practice opportunities