Not useful

Stupid!

I often skip reading reviews of a course before enrolling as I often find "most useful reviews" being a bit harsh even if the average rate is near 5-stars. After I completed this course, I looked up the reviews and I was right about what I thought I was going to find. So the first thing that has to be addressed is that it's indeed true that this course feels a lot different from the previous two ones. But that's to be expected. The first two ones are too simple and too easy, so it doesn't come as a surprise that you get the feeling that they were better courses overall (as if the explanations were better and the assignments were more reasonable), because they were about simple things that were kept inside Python just to get used to this programming language, but this course is about interacting with other applications and languages without really explaining how they work. But explaining what exactly XML, JSON, API's. etc. are and how they work would take at least 1 course more for each one of them. So what can you expect when just 1 course covers all of these while still teaching you the basics of Python? It makes it feel rushed but that doesn't mean that it's bad. As Dr. Chuck has explained before, this specialization is about getting used to Python, getting to know what you can do with it rather than becoming a professional, so that then you can enroll in more courses about Python or other languages and not feel like you're completely lost and this course does that job perfectly. You still get a good idea about what those things are without deeply studying those subjects. Finall, the assignments are not just tweaking code but you also have to understand how they work, otherwise you would struggle even is most of the code is already written in the examples. You have to figure out a lot of things by yourself but it's not very difficult. You don't have to look up things on Youtube or Stackoverflow as others have stated, that's just exaggerating. Everything you need is in this course or in the provided book.

I just finished Using Python to Access Web Data, which is the third (3rd) course in the Python for Everybody specialization. The course wasn't so easy as the previous courses in the specialization as I had to spend more time debugging and practicing, nevertheless, it was lot more fun.

Completing and learning the coursework in this course would definitely have been impossible without the Python for Everybody team which includes the good Dr.Chuck and the mentors. There are many things I liked in this course. The discussion forums were great, the videos and slides were really cool and the mentors did great stuff like checking your code for you and other good stuffs. Becoming a programmer is subject to many constraints and the chiefest of this is the need for mentor-ship and the Python for Everybody team understands this so well.

There is just one flaw. I recommend more sample projects, more course work , more content, and more work files but this would make the course boring, last much more longer and nobody wants to grow grey hair learning python. The best way to take care of this might be to introduce an additional course. Notwithstanding,I give this course a 5-star rating and recommend it to anyone who has a thing for python and who has a good understanding of its syntax and data structures covered in the previous courses of the specialization.

This was a great learning experience. It was tough but in the end, you feel satisfied that you worked hard and your efforts paid off. Dr. Chuck is a great teacher, content creator and an inspiring technologist. I really enjoyed, apart from the core course content, his interviews of original creators such as the WWW, JSON, at the CERN centre etc. It helped me understand and empathise with myself when I found it difficult to grasp certain concepts.

I have one complaint though. The teaching staff (especially one Ms Tamara Brunnock) are nasty, rude towards beginner students like me and others. The discussion forums should be a courteous place to exchange thoughts and reveal your ignorances. However these teaching staff bully students with rhetorical questions. I don't know why they are teaching staff if they don't love the subject, love teaching and love interacting with students. I got zero value addition through these discussion forums. In some of these forums, there are external freelancers who help you out and that is the only help you get.

Beyond all this quibbling, Dr. Chuck is a great instructor and my computer knowledge is solely thanks to him.

As in the previous courses, the material was well explained and easy to follow. Dr. Severance is charismatic and makes the best of a less-than-ideal medium.

The assignments ended up being quite fun, but the wording is not always 100% clear, which I imagine poses some problems for those whose English isn't great.

The other thing is that the assignments were always more complicated than the examples shown. In some cases, it was possible to apply what we learned; in others, it was necessary to look up how to do certain things. That's not a problem, but expectations should be more clearly communicated because people will waste hours trying to modify code they were shown only to discover that there is a very specific way of writing something. It's akin to showing someone a few collocations in a foreign language and expecting them to intuitively know an idiom they've never seen before. However, for people who are barely learning how to code, assembling and adapting code is perfectly fine, as long as you understand exactly what everything does.

5-Star Review for "Using Python to Access Web Data" Course! 🌟

I recently completed the "Using Python to Access Web Data" course, and I am thrilled with the knowledge and skills I've gained! 🚀🌐

This course takes you on an exciting journey through the world of web scraping, APIs, and data formats like JSON, XML, and HTML. The hands-on approach, comprehensive content, and engaging exercises allowed me to truly grasp the concepts and apply them in real-world scenarios. 📊💡

The instructors' expertise and clear explanations made complex topics accessible, and the interactive learning environment kept me engaged and motivated. 🙌🔗

Whether you're a data enthusiast, developer, or someone eager to unlock the power of web data, this course is an invaluable resource. I am now equipped with practical skills that I can immediately apply to projects and challenges. 🌍🔍

I wholeheartedly recommend the "Using Python to Access Web Data" course to anyone looking to enhance their data skills and embark on a data-driven journey with Python! 🎓🐍

This has been an excellant designed course for everyone who is interested to become part of python programming course.

Dr. Chuck has been an expectional trainer throught out the course material and his method of explainning the slides while parallely informing that this particular content would help you resolve the 'Grade Exrecise' later down the course is simply awesome.

Once you finish the course,you would definately be in a position to understand from simple to medium complexity python programs.I would like to add one smart trick here "speciality of the course and explanation is the number of times you browse through the video material,more you will increase your understanding for that particular topic.

I can't thanks coursera and Dr. chuck enough to help people learning python so effectively and efficiently and making us build python community.

I began learning Python with this course. With absolutely no prior knowledge of or experience in Python (except lots of curiosity), I came across the first two courses on Coursera.org and loved Dr Charles' videos. It's a well structured course, especially if you have just started learning about Python and wish to build your skills more practically than by mere reading of numerous resources. There are plenty of resources that Dr Chuck (as he is fondly referred to by his students) offers in the duration of the course. I especially enjoy the bonus videos that accompany this course. They really help increase your knowledge base and urge you to know and be better and try your hand at various things. I'm glad I decided to pursue the entire specialization offered by University of Michigan, and it is all thanks to Dr. Chuck!

This is a wonderful course and a great tool to learn Python along with some obtaining some fundamental information about the Internet.The video lectures are very clear and accompanied by slides which elaborate the discussed topics. The course also presents a lot of bonus material including interviews. I love the lecturer who gives excellent explanations. My favourite moment was when after explaining the topic about the structure of the internet by a chart Dr. Charles Severance paused for a moment and breathed out heavily and said: "Actually it is easier (the topic) than it sounds". But, of course, his explanations were perfect, he is just passionate about transmitting the information to the students in the easiest to understand manner.And I have to say he succeeds admirably.Overall, I highly recommend this course

The course was rich and I learned so many things about web scraping, some regular expressions,parsing html, accessing web data and extracting information from the web, how data is exchanged between different softwares across the web and how to manipulate and parse this data if it was xml or JSON, and a brief introduction to service oriented architecture and what's an API and how to use APIs in your application to add a certain feature.

As always, Dr-Chuck is a great and an engaging instructor and I enjoy his lectures so much!

The only thing that I wished was more clear when I began this course is the exact curriculum and the exact skills that the learner should have by the end of it. I had to do a lot of researching and to thoroughly study the text book to achieve that. Other than that everything was 10/10!

This course is a good introduction to various aspects of web data. It's a pretty broad overview, so no one topic gets too much focus, but I feel much more informed about working with data from various web sources—how you get it, how it's formatted, and how to work with it once you've retrieved it. Dr. Chuck is a great teacher, and the assignments help you understand the material covered in the lectures through some hands-on work. One downside to this course as compared to the previous courses in the series is that the assignments seemed to involve more direct copying of example code, and less problem solving, which means it was harder to feel that I'd really mastered the techniques. That said, the materials provided are good examples and I'm sure I'll return to them in the future.

The comments from other students about this being maddening and difficult are fair. There's a lot of arcane stuff in the commands needed to simply set up a connection and there are several places where it's not always clear how to get some code running (eg, twurl, oauth). Two responses that still make the five star rating make sense: 1) the forum was actually pretty helpful in getting through some of the problems; and 2) learning how to solve problems by poking around and experimenting is part of what we need to learn. Finally, I think the whole thing of how do you address individual elements of something returned - JSON or XML - should be a bit of a struggle. Forced me to think, work through things on paper, and I've learned some debugging techniques.

First, thank you Dr. Chuck for the well-designed class.

Here are a few things that may help improve this class:

first, it might make more sense if you introduce python class or object first, then the package and method and return type will make more sense.

second, it could include more coding for scraping on the web, the examples are very limited(well, ok I understand this is a pretty introductory course....)

Last, for those who use python3, there are many thinks you should notice to make ur code work, such as from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, also notice the urllib has been split so you should import urllib.request and urllib.parse, also for those return value as byte, use decode('utf8') to convert it to strings, otherwise it will cause a lot of trouble in json

I really like the way Dr. Chuck explains the modules. So far, this is the best programming course I've had (certainly I haven't had many of them) and in few weeks I've learned a lot of stuff in short time thanks to the dosage of the course and Dr. Chuck.

On the other hand, I feel week 5 and 6 were a little bit saturated. Not a big concern.

I've read some of other's reviews and I can't explain why this third part of the specialization was too difficult. I never needed any forum's consultancies and I'm 20 years old and this is my first programming course in my entire life. I do believe that Dr. Chuck maybe wanted to grab so much, but is really easy to figure out the assignments with the book, the videos, the python codes that he gave us and so on.

As I mentioned in the previous reviews about this Specialisation, all these courses are meant for beginners without previous programming experience and the 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.To sum up: great course, uprising difficulties, recommend enrolling after finishing previous courses. 10/10

People use Python for many purposes: to make games, build web services, to solve business problems, to work with sensors, drivers and robots. Python is also used heavily in scientific fields for academic research and applied work.

Python is an incredibly efficient language: your programs will do more in fewer lines of code than many other languages would require.

Py4inf and Python explained by C. Servance, is a great developing of the foundations in programming (first two courses) that will serve you well for the rest of your life, as well as a course that will give you a sort of try to understanding of what great things python can do for you.

I strongly recommend this course for anybody, who wants to start with informatics.

The "Using Python to Access Web Data" course on Coursera is an absolute gem for anyone looking to delve into web scraping and data retrieval with Python. Dr. Charles Severance, the instructor, does an outstanding job of breaking down complex concepts into digestible, practical lessons. The course offers a comprehensive introduction to web scraping, utilizing libraries like BeautifulSoup and urllib, making it accessible to beginners while also providing valuable insights for more experienced programmers. The hands-on assignments and quizzes are incredibly beneficial in reinforcing the learning. Overall, this course is a must for anyone interested in harnessing the power of Python for web data manipulation. Highly recommended!

This is an excellent course. Its level, its intensity, and the assignments are appropriate for people who knew nothing about programming and whose knowledge derives from the courses in this specialization. For students with this background, the time taken to read the material, watch the videos, and prepare the assignments exceeds that advertised in the course, especially the time to complete the assignments. To complete the assignment one needs to master the material and that takes time, more than to understand it, which is easy to do. The information on time spent should be corrected. I have learned much in the three courses taken so far, and expect to continue learning in the remaining two courses in the specialization.

Great course(s). Great instructor(s). Thank you so much guys for having us here taking this awesome online class "Using Python to Access Web Data", with this I've learned a lot with course, from a newbie and now turned into a starter. I would also like to extend my thanks to Dr. Chuck and the rest of the faculty and staff for making this helpful and awesome free courses, this was been a big help to me/us to gain new skills and continue to learn new things and got a bunch of great and awesome stuffs like this one offered from the MU. I loved it and it's been an honored for being one of the students having this course and finished this great opportunity and learning path via online. Big time for me and so thankful!.

While Course 3 is significantly more challenging and technical than Courses 1 and 2 from the Python specialization, I found this to be the first time I truly felt that my Python knowledge was practically applied. Although parsing local text files is fine, one of my main goals with Python was learning to use it to interface with APIs in a seamless manner. I was also very curious as to how web scraping is actually performed, and I'm proud to say that I finally learned how it works. This course is very valuable for anyone who feels everything they've learned in Python up until this point is highly theoretical and indispensable for anyone looking to apply their Python knowledge in a professional environment.

The "Using Python to Access Web Data" course on Coursera is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to harness the power of Python in web-related tasks. Dr. Chuck's clear and engaging teaching style demystifies web scraping, API interactions, and data retrieval, making complex concepts accessible to all. The hands-on assignments and peer-graded projects provide practical experience, reinforcing learning. This course equips learners with essential skills for data collection and manipulation, crucial in today's data-driven world. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced programmer, this course offers a comprehensive and enjoyable journey into web data access using Python. Highly recommended!

It was a good introductory course for web applications using Python and I consider the coding assignments to be pretty challenging. It was hard to learn to be honest, consider how short the explanations are. As the XML, JSON and API concepts are not deeply detailed, the beginners can find it really overwhelming. Its because lots of background knowledge is necessary to get the best of this course. I would prefer it to be longer but still, I'm highly motivated to learn more about APIs in the forth coming days. This course has helped me to put extra effort in my studying journey. I highly recommend people to check out this course to get a hook on how web data can be accessed using Python.

Using Python to Access Web Data is a very good course for everyone who wants to continue his learning journey with python. After completing this course, I gained a strong understanding on how to use python to acces web data and the essential concepts of web like protocols,html,xml,json,APIs.., it was very helpful for me and i enjoyed my learning journey a lot especially with Dr.Chuck who was clear, straight to the point, and funny sometimes so that i couldn't feel boredom. I'd like to thank Coursera, Dr Chuck, University of Michigan for this incredible course which made me highly motivated to continue my learning and take the remaining 2 courses of the specialization, Big Thanks.

The quality of this Coursera specialization continues. Lots of great information about networks and how to interact with them. My interest is definitely piqued for Dr. Chuck's book, "Introduction to Networking" and course "Internet History, Technology, and Security". The programming assignments continue to be straight forward and rewarding. As others have mentioned, the content can be a bit more challenging and technical with slightly less focus on Python than the previous py4e courses. However, the information provides great understanding on how to interact with the internet through Python which is a very common application. It's worth it if you're up for the challenge!