I moved to the US a couple years ago and started my career from scratch in completely different sphere - Quality Assurance. I never supposed myself to be a technical person and felt uncomfortable with IT things. I have in my head the combination of tech terms and tools mixed up with huge gaps, this course helped me to systematize my knowledge and feel more confident and engaged with what I am doing. I completed 3/4 sessions and would rate the first two 5 stars, and probably give a little bit less, 4 stars, to the third one, only because sometimes I had to find on the Internet additional materials which were not covered by lecture and course materials to complete my assignments.

Dr. Chuck is great! I've been his fan for years! The assignments are rigid.

Here is my only concern:

Why do I have to use the libraries that are recommended by Dr. Chuck. Can't I chose my own? I encountered some problems with 'urllib' module. I wanted to complete this course in a few days. I could complete all my assignments without having to install urllib, but for the last assignment, the assignment did not accept a solution I came up with 'requests' module. I had to crack my head open to fix the issues with that library, then submit the assignment. It was totally unnecessary. In real world scenarios, I've always used 'requests'. I've only used 'urllib' once or may be twice.

Overall, this is a good course for a person new to Python programming like me. The stuff is broken down into simpler terms and is explained properly. The thing that I expected was to include all the data structures that we learned in 1st and 2nd courses to be applied, and slowly build up the difficulty level. The initial part till the XML was good, and the difficulty level was increasing. Then suddenly, more theory about Json and API got occupied, and less about data structure manipulation. Besides, I skipped all the bonus lectures, and for a person who's truly interested to solve Python, that's totally unnecessary. Keep only the required videos and remove the rest, please.

Dr. Chuck's explanations are clear and all the lessons are easy to follow: focus on relevant web technologies, perfect pace, examples based on popular APIs. As someone with some basic knowledge in programming already I was expecting the assignments to be more challenging. As clearly announced on the website this course is targeted at beginners who took the previous courses from the same teacher: all exercises can be solved in about 10-15 lines of code and the solutions can be directly applied from the videos without much further thinking. The rest of you will, like me, breeze through it in no time. Kudos for the interesting interview videos proposed as bonus material!

There were so many new libraries and concepts introduced in the last two chapters. It became a little bit confusing and overwhelming. Yes, a huge part of coding is picking up new tools on the spot, but it would be great to understand the fundamental theories behind how some of these libraries and concepts work at least once before being plunged into that reality! Also, I think that being overwhelmed could cause a lot of students to simply quit before they have really understood how the resources out there (documentation, etc.) could help them. Also, as the students start have to read multiple docs, etc. the time expectations per week should be increased.

great energy and great class.

1. nice assignment website, but it could use a bit file up-load and nosetest to held automate grading.

2. I wish they have more web robot, crawling, interesting problem examples.

3. peer review would be nice, so a better read-able pythonic programming style can be nurtured.

4. wondering if the course grading website can be done in ipython notebook.

4. I guess the instructor mention using RESTful, it could be also nice to have an assignment or

project to make a REST server with some database(sql-ed or sql-less).

After all there a are lot of big data out there to be accessed and processed.

Great course that gets you to the point where you can start to do interesting things with computers in the context of the web in the MINIMUM amount of time possible. This focus on keeping the time commitment required to reach an interesting place down to a minimum is great because it enhances the chances of course completion. The flip side is you will need to do more on your own to reach "industrial strength" knowledge. (A great compromise in my view)

The course could be improved by providing a few more recommendations of high quality learning resources for going deeper (later) in each topic

An extremely well-structured and useful course. As someone who had only syntactical familiarity with Python, this course taught me a great deal about the ease and power of the language. Moreover, the technical knowledge included (APIs, RegEx, etc) is highly relevant and practical.

Given that it's part of an introductory series, the difficulty level of the assignments is understandable. But providing some more rigorous optional assignments can be a welcome addition to the course.

That being said, I would recommend it to anyone looking to explore Python and the power it grants with its simplicity.

Un curso interesante, sin embargo es algo más complejo que los dos anteriores. Ya que se introducen otros temas que no son propiamente Python; sino otros lenguajes (convenciones) que se usan en la web, y que no son muy detallados en el curso -sólo lo necesario-. Por ende, aunque el mismo es muy trabajable gracias a los videos y el libro guía, las últimas 2 semanas llegan a ser algo confusas en cuanto que algunos ejemplos tienen elementos que no se explican a profundidad. Sólo los pones para que funcione el código, y a mi parecer es algo frustrante. En general, sigue siendo un buen curso.

Using Python to Access Web Data is a good and short course, but do not expect to go deep, as it is a part of the Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python), and not an advanced course on programming. It is an excellent course for getting a taste of using Python to access data on the web.The course only lacks more live coding with more difficult examples, so the student could see a real programmer line of thought.I've used Python 3, the examples are not hard to port to Python 3, and if you are stuck trying to use Python try you can ask for help in the Python community.

Very good introduction to how to scrape the web and how data is transferred on the web. Dr. Severance is an excellent instructor.

That said, I can't give this course a 5/5 because it still uses the urllib.request module to make 'Get' requests, when the 'requests' module is far simpler and possibly faster. I appreciated learning how to access data using the 'socket' module because it seems to give a more nuanced understanding of what's going on when you send a 'get' request, but I don't see any reason not to use requests.get() instead of urllib.request.urlopen().

I find the target of the course, to use Python to access web data, extremely useful. Been always wondered how to do it, and now at the end of the course, I've made myself familiar with these techniques. The only reason I didn't give it a 5-star is I feel like it can made more focused by giving a lot more practice and examples about what we will actually use, and maybe forget about scratching the surface when mentioning the lower level of http. I find it sort of frustrating just copy and past some lines of codes from the lecture and didn't really know it is.

I think the course has some room for improvement, e.g. the quiz questions eps. in the first couple of weeks didn't exactly seem to fit with the content of the videos - this was different in previous courses. If additional reading of the textbook materials was required, it should have been explicitly mentioned. Also, their are some hickups with the disconnect between the content of the videos and the actual state of the google and twitter API, but I think for the assignements it was nicely solved, so no issue there. Overall very content with the course.

This course was definitely a bit more challenging than the previous 2 course, but at the same time, it was extremely exciting to be learning so much more and the applications of it. You get to learn a lot more difficult coding and see how it applies to the real world. Professor Severance is such a wonderful professor! I wish I actually had come across this course sooner in my life because I wouldn't had wasted my time paying thousands of dollars to a University that puts no effort into their students learning at all. Cheers to Professor Severance :)

Very instructive and interesting. Was able to understand the basic of Web Data and will be able to easily get deeper into it if I wish so after having a solid basic knowledge.

I do, however, have a couple of constrcutive comments:

1st - Is it possible to release a couple of commented alternative solutions to the graded assignments to those who have already passed it? This would help us students to learn even more.

2nd- Please keep the Quiz questions solely to contents discussed on the video lectures. (some questions were not discussed in the videos)

Sadly in comparison with the first two courses of this specialization in 'Using Python to Access Web Data' the difficulty increases exponentially. For me it was definitely harder to keep the pace with all the infos. Instead of the office hours and the interviews to VIPs and other relevant people to the field I'd like to see more worked exercises. Also, after May 25 2018 both Google and Twitter changed their policies about the retrieval of data. So it was impossible to follow the instuctions step by step on how to build an API in Twitter.

Quite good material and presentation, with two caveats.

First, the TA is terrible. They respond rudely and with a great deal of condescension to nearly every comment they make. Avoid interacting with them if you can.

Second, some of the templates for assignments have significantly more sophisticated approaches than are necessary to complete the assignments. You might learn the most by starting from scratch each time, but nonetheless I think Dr. Chuck is a pretty great teacher. He really makes you feel like you can do this. And he's right!

It's a good course, but I think I had some issues with parts of it. I passed everything, but I can't help but think that I really don't know what I did most of the time. The exercises mostly involved modifying a given file to parse some kind of data from a given url. I could do it each time, but I don't think I learned how to do this well enough to do it again without having a script to use as a template.

There are a few places where the videos didn't feel like they prepared me for the exercises. It was just kind of frustrating.

I loved this course, however, there is some room for improvement:

(a) Putting code side-by-side with video of Dr Chuck (like it was done in previous lectures) would be better.

(b) Make the end-of-week assignments more challenging. I felt that the quizzes were good, but, the coding assignments were too easy and the solution was practically spoon fed.

Other than that, the course was really good. Dr Chuck is a natural in front of the camera. I also really enjoyed some of the more complex code samples presented during the lectures.

Great coverage of the material, however some of the sample scripts were nearly complete and required little, if any, modification to complete the assignment. They clearly tried to find the balance between providing challenging exercises and providing working packages of scripts so that students can accomplish more complicated tasks using additional tools that are, on their own, beyond the scope of the project. I just think they could have provided a bit less to make some of the later exercises a bit more challenging.

I found this course to be a lot harder than the previous 2 (which is not an issue per se). I feel like I understand a much smaller proportion of the content than the other courses and I am having to copy a lot of code without truly understanding what they achieve (I merely know that I must for the code to function properly). The last task in particular didn't even require me to change any of the code from 'you will write a python program somewhat similar to... '. Was I supposed to write all of that from scratch?

This course is definitely a great introduction to how Python can interact with web data. Towards the end it gets a bit overwhelming because of the complexity of dealing with APIs, but I feel like I came away with the fundamental skillset necessary if I wanted to explore the topics further. I appreciated that the assignments emphasized the way key programming concepts from prior courses apply to these topics (instead of sending students down rabbit holes of understanding the nitty gritty of pulling web data).

As a beginner to coding, I was lost at the week 2 assignment. I don't even know where to construct my code and test it at first. I was struggling for days and searching for further help on the Internet. It would be great if there is a guide for where to put the code, where and how to save the code file.

In addition, Dr. Chuck is trying to squeeze too much content into one course in my opinion.

However, it's a fantastic course overall and I enjoyed it!!! Appreciate everyone's effort on preparing this course :)

This course is like a new territory compared to the two courses before. The first course is simple and easy. the second course is a little bit confusing. This course is very very confusing(the teaching is good, but the knowledge is very new to me). But being confusing is not bad, I've learned many new things from this course and the confusion i got from this course encourages me to go back to review this course and previous course before jumping into the next course and get more confused. Good course!

The course was good. I got to learn so much things, though it was introductory and just basic in nature but it gave me an idea that what I can do next.

I learnt Regex, parsing data using XML and JSON and Beautiful Soup. I think that there needs to be a little more depth to these topics. Though it was overall a good experience my suggestion would be to include a project at last that requires to do a real world problem solving where the students can apply their knowledge on each of the skills learnt.