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I'd give this course a 4.5 star, if half star ratings were allowed. I found this course to be very informative, very well presented, & had a good progression of difficulty starting very basic & gradually getting more complex. I also liked that this course gave links for further reading/study outside of the course itself. I also liked that when I got questions wrong on the graded assessments I was linked back to where I could learn the answer to that question. A couple of things held this course back from receiving a 5 star from me. This course didn't go over the dir() or help() functions which would have been very useful at times. On one of the graded assessments (or maybe it wasn't a graded assessment, but a section in the following module) some questions involved object-oriented programming which was an optional portion. I did the optional part so it was fine for me, however if someone skipped the optional part I don't see how they would understand Event Classes. The least explained portion of the course was "Python in Action" in module 5, the import function was used for 4 different imports that weren't explained very well. From another course I learned the dir() & help() function & tried to use those to make sense of what was happening, but I never fully understood it. Most concepts had a video + a reading which was very well done, but this one reading, the hardest out of all of them had no video & minimal explanations while bringing in a bunch of new functions not shown before in the course.

The content was very good, but, ironically, the algorithms for grading the assignments were sometimes janky; including, and perhaps especially, the final exam. The widget for uploading the text file failed, then the grading mechanism kept failing to pass code that accurately fulfilled the requirements of the exam. On the quizes for various chapters, similar things would happen. The code would produce the exact results requested, but would inexplicably return a failure to pass. Luckily, only an 80% grade was required to pass. I would have been very frustrated if I had been unable to pass an entire quiz due to these glitches.

The instructions for quiz questions were also a bit vague at times, and not always entirely intuitive. There is a habit among folks who write documentation and instruction materials for all manner of IT-related content, to use a programmer's version of "lawyer-speak", so to speak. That is, speaking as though the audience is already as familiar with the subject as they are, which is, obviously, not very logical for instructional material. That wasn't as big a problem here, but having to read between the lines on what to do resulted in my having to spend more time peeling layers off an onion for a solution that could have been more skinning an apple from the get-go.

Maybe when I finish the certification, you should hire someone like me to address some of these issues for you, lol. Other than that, the videos and core content were really quite good, as I said in the beginning.

What I loved about this course was that it was very engaging. There were periodic quizzes and exercises to give me plenty of practice. The main presenter was animated, enthusiastic, and spoke naturally. The course's pacing was excellent.

I'm an experienced programmer, and this course was exactly what I was looking for. If you're a complete beginner at programming, this course may be challenging. Some of the exercises seem to be testing problem solving as opposed to language comprehension.

The course has a few issues, such as a handful of poorly explained concepts and vague project requirements, but even with those issues, I would highly recommend it.

One missing topic that I would have liked to see would be advice for troubleshooting code. For example, I often find it helpful to use print statements to display variables while the code is running. This is similar to lifting the hood of a car and observing the engine to troubleshoot car issues (I think!). Also, it appears that feedback on the content is generally being dismissed. I saw a lot of feedback on the forums that address easily fixed issues that were posted years ago, but the issues persist.

Finally, thank goodness, the final project was relatively easy. If you passed the tests during the course, you should have no issues with the final project.

Good luck!