I thoroughly enjoyed this course. It skims the surface of basic Python you need for Data Analysis, which is exactly what I was looking for. You get a general understanding of basic Python elements, syntax, useful libraries and some examples of really simple data analysis.

The main disadvantage of this course is a couple of exercises at the end of hands-on labs that do not correspond to the course material by their level of difficulty. To me, as a person with zero programming background, it felt like I've just been explained addition on examples like 2+3 and then asked to add something like exponential numbers and square roots. Judging by the discussion forums, I am not the only one who felt this way, which was the only thing to keep me from thinking that I am too dumb for this and giving up. I believe those tasks are great as extra challenges but must be marked accordingly.

The other odd thing is that really useful info specifically for Data Analysis process is contained in optional videos and labs, so I advise future learners to draw attention to them despite their being non-compulsory to finish this course.

Thanks to all the course authors and moderators.

The course itself was fine, and the project was helpful. I’m thankful to IBM to come out with this course. But the Watson Studio part could be very frustrating. It is not really relevant to Python study, but you will have to use the Studio for your final project. I found he Studio to have very complex layouts, very hard to nevigate, a lack of guidance on the studio itself. I was to give 3 stars as my final project experience was so ruined by the Watson Studio, I definitely spent way more hours on figuring out Watson Studio than the Python part of the studio, and not feel it’s helpful to know Watson Studio as I probably will not use it in the future. But my reasonableness and fairness side told me, the very end of an experience in general puts more weight on one’s overall experience on something, so a bad ending of it could potentially make me to give a biased opinion, towards the down side, to the experience. So trying to overcome that bias, and being appreciate for IBM to put this course together and Coursera to offer it, I gave 4 stars.

The Coursera course on Python for Data Science, AI & Development is an exceptional resource for anyone who wants to learn Python programming and its applications in data science and artificial intelligence. The course starts with the basics of Python programming and gradually progresses to advanced topics such as data manipulation, visualization, and machine learning. One of the key strengths of the course is its practical approach, with numerous hands-on exercises and projects that allow learners to apply what they have learned in real-world scenarios. The instructors are knowledgeable and engaging, and the course is well-structured and easy to follow, with clear explanations and examples. Additionally, the course provides a supportive learning environment, with a dedicated discussion forum where learners can ask questions and get help from instructors and other learners. Overall, I would highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to improve their Python programming skills and learn its applications in data science and AI.

Python for Data Science, AI & Development" provides a comprehensive overview of Python programming tailored for data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and software development. The course covers essential Python concepts such as data types, control structures, functions, and object-oriented programming. It delves into libraries and frameworks commonly used in data science and AI, including NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, and scikit-learn. The course also explores advanced topics such as machine learning algorithms, natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning with TensorFlow and Keras. With hands-on exercises and practical examples, it equips learners with the skills needed to analyze data, build AI models, and develop Python-based applications effectively. Overall, it's a valuable resource for anyone looking to embark on a journey into the exciting fields of data science and AI using Python.

This course was amazing for me. It was my first experience on Coursera and it was fabulous. I would like to thank IBM and Coursera for providing me with such an opportunity to gain some extra skills along with my studies.

The course content was good, but I would like to share some thoughts on the content.

1) There were few programs in the labs for self-practice.

2) Questions in the practice quizzes should be increased and should cover the whole topic.

3) Additional links for self-practice should be provided for good practice and knowledge.

4) Functions should be taught in detail.

5) The videos on the libraries should be more.

6) Libraries should be taught more than just the introductory level.

7) Libraries should be taught thoroughly.

I hope that these suggestions should be taken into account.

In the end, I would like to thank IBM and Coursera for giving me a chance to learn and build some skills.

This course was fantastic up until the final project. I could not have finished it without the help of the folks in the discussion forums. The project was challenging, but then getting it into the right system so that it could be graded by my peers was a real headache. My suggestion is to provide more examples of how to access a website and use tuples with variables and numbers. The lesson only teaches us to use tuples with numbers.

The explanation said that the project should only take 1 hour. It took me nearly 3 hours, and most of the time was spent googling the terminology and other people's code so I would know how to start. It took me about an hour to figure out how to load the Album Cover project. I think having all of the labs and projects in the left panel was confusing. We are only used to seeing an intro, the project, and the peer review section.

What went good: Handy ipynb notebooks, great labs. Nice course to refresh python knowledge

what didn't:

- Audio sometimes included some buzz, everything clear enough, but audio quality coult be improved.

- Several errors in quizes (example - question where you open("somefile","w") and write to it, and the possible answers - "You append, You read, error" , some questions in final exam were VERY poorly formatted

- List comprehensions were not covered, just referenced in one of labs.

- Time series were not covered as well, course could benefit a lot, covering these in another 4 minutes video and some lab

- In video Watson something API keys creation were referenced, stating the instructions will be in lab, I didnt find any.

Overall nice course, with a bit more love from staff it could shine

This is a great course for people who are complete beginners to coding. If you take your time with all the materials, and use the Coach Chatbot, you are likely to be able to self-teach very easily with this course. One issue is, is that if you already know a language like Java from prior experience, it makes more sense to use the Coach to direct your learning so you can understand what's different rather than trying to learn the language from scratch. Maybe you can use an LLM to restructure the course in this way if you alreaedy know a previous language. I mainly just needed to know about the datatypes of sets, dictionaries, and lists and what the difference are to arrays and multidimensional arrays in Java, if you get my drift.

The course covers a number of topics Basic Python, Pandas, Numpy, and an intro to machine learning and AI. At the start of the course the labs did not work correctly. I downloaded the files and ran them locally which worked great. Later in the class you are introduced to the IBM Watson/Cloud service. You can establish a free account for 30 days. You can run the labs "in the cloud" if you cannot run locally. So, if you cannot run locally or in the class portal use the IBM cloud. The class is not really a beginner class, you should have experience with Jupyter Notebooks and Jupyter Lab before you start. A lot of topics are covered quickly. The Pandas section is covered quickly, and towards the end I felt things got rushed.

The Course is designed for absolute beginners. I am an absolute beginner. For us, every added element not otherwise discussed in the course is unnecessary difficulty. Absolute beginners don't even understand coding, ibm cloud to the level of the complex questions raised in the course. Think of novice IT students as individuals who have absolutely no idea beyond daily interactions of apple and windows. So when we are asked complex questions, we cannot understand it. But with extra time we eventually all get there. The course is very well designed, but it would be great if the final assignment is made from topics covered in class. We are not at the level of being exploratory in programming! LOL

Completing the course during earlier Spring of 2020 was a challenge. "Lab Migration" led for great instability and availability of the jupyter lab notebooks required for the labs. Multiple day outages became more than a minor inconvenience. Switching between different lab systems was a non-trivial. It is an IBM provided course, but using IBM watson, is a questionable choice for this class.

As an introductory course to Python for data science, course material was at an appropriate level. I wish there was more time spend on the basic with using Pandas and numpy. I spent quite a bit of personal time researching other websites to learn more of the nuances of using them.

It was fairly easy to complete and informative. I am giving it 4 stars instead of 5 because of the issues with course materials that came from the IBM older website cognitiveclass.ai/

. Several instructions were presented using graphics that is unreadable on higher resolution monitors - even with zoom in browser set to max. They also referred to older version if the cloud.ibm.com and it took a lot of completely unnecessary effort (on part every participant and even some of the course TAs) to figure out how to overcome those. You could hire three tech developers/tech writers for about a week to completely update instructions. Instead 160K participants struggling with them.

Overall a very good intro to the power of Python. I'm a SAS programmer and this course helped me get a handle on object oriented languages and how the relate and differ from SAS, as an example. I really liked that I didn't have to download or prepare anything on my computer to use python for the course, it was all handled in virtual spaces. I didn't give 5 stars just because there was some inconsistency in the ramping up of the labs, or the quizzes at the bottom of the labs. Some of the labs were very easy and then boom, suddenly I'm being stretched way beyond in the next task to perform. They were useful learning tasks, but it was pretty jarring.

First of all, I feel happy to learn.

I know I'm not supposed to say how to teach, but I got the impression that most of the "Python for Data Science, AI & Development" program was very fast. The videos are super fast, I know I can pause but I think it was going against my learning.

The Hands-on labs helped to understand a lot. In that sense, I think that videos should be used to complement or highlight crucial information instead of repeating the content twice.

And for someone who doesn't know Python programming, it was a crash course.

In any case, I appreciate the opportunity and the Coursera platform with the labs available to work online are excellent.

Really nice pace - simple to follow and labs were cool (some issues with the lab notebooks not loading up - not sure what the issue was here, but continuously trying to open them seemed to open them finally). The final assignment needed a bit of critical thinking towards the end, as there was no prior teaching of linking IBM Cloud to IBM Watson, so inputting codes from one site to another was awkward and felt hit-and-miss (thinking, wait, is this what they want me to do, or is it this?). Overall, a wonderfully-designed Python introductory course with a couple of teething issues with notebooks. I would recommend the course.

This course was very helpful and full of valuable information. However, I would have appreciated more instances of directed practice. Maybe a few more scenarios in order to practice what I have learned. The labs were very helpful in illustrating each lesson but there was little practice available. I enjoyed using IBM Watson, it seems very useful however some of the instructions were unclear and having to create new accounts for each task was a bit annoying given that I would definitely have to signup to use the services in any substantial manner.

All in all, it was a good course but it could definitely be improved upon.

Luckily, I was familiar with python when I started this course, so I could review and understand quickly. But I can easily imagine that it can be a headache for a real beginner. Lots of contents are being taught in a fast pace in short videos, which can be confusing for a beginner. Also the examples could have been a lot simpler and clearer. Sometimes the examples even confused me about a topic that I already knew about perfectly.

Overall, if a beginner spends enough time on this course and keeps searching and reading about the concepts, it can be a very useful source of knowledge! Cheers

There is a lot of good learning to be had in this course. There is also a lot of improvement needed to ensure that the instructions in the course align with the IBM Watson web pages, menus, and instructions. It delays progress because one must try to figure out how to do what the instructions say given that IBM Watson's website has changed since this course was written. Also, just a note - for videos associated with IBM, there are an an awful lot of typos and "misspoken" sentences. A good overall review is needed. That said, I really did enjoy the course once I got into the real learning.

The course is shallow but quite broad i.e. it covers a lot but just gives you very few basics of the topics. It would be quite helpful to note the topics that are covered and use them as guidelines of what to know during your studying journey.

The labs are very very helpful and you might find yourself spending a couple hours on a lab that should supposedly take you 15 min :D. Varies from person to person though so it's all good as long as you come in with the goal of learning rather than just getting your name on the certificate.

All the best on your journeys.

The videos and practice notebooks were well made and informative in a concise way. Even though I had already done Python programming before, I had never taken a basic course on it so it was useful to get a structured intro to some of the basic ways of data structure manipulation that I wasn't aware of. My main minus point comes from the final assignment which is a bit too easy - given the fact that it's a programming assignment you could make an automatic grading system like on many other programming courses on Coursera and make the assignment more challenging.

The course was very informational. I loved the layout of video (intro), then lab (hands on and interactive experience), then quiz (testing what you learned). The only thing I did not like was Week 5 where we worked with Watson. It seemed like we were working on things that we did not learn throughout the course. I would have preferred if we were able to continue working in a python environment outside Watson and using information we actually learned in the course. To be honest, the end of the course was quite frustrating. Overall though, great! Thanks.

The course is overall nice, but at some points in hand-on lab the exercises jumps to new functions which has not been discussed previously. Furthermore, there is a bit of repetition in between videos, reading material, and hands-on lab. In between the repetitions there are some new points, which is good, but at the same point you might skip them thinking you have already went through it. I feel it should have more exercises with gradual difficulty curve. These are my concerns, but the course is really nice to go through the basic concepts

I really enjoyed the subject matter in this course. Sometimes the information presented in the videos is presented in a rapid fire manner, which makes it challenging to follow the line of thought (I'm a complete beginner to computer science/data science). Also, I (along with other students) experienced some frustration with labs not working/loading. However, when trying again a day or 2 later, it seemed to work without any glitches. The final project was enjoyable, but I wish there had been a lab similar to the dashboard project.

The course does a good job with teaching you the general basics of Python. Unfortunately, it doesn't go into details as I had hoped. Moreover, I was disappointed that the final project relies heavily on the lessons learned near the end of the course. Nevertheless, it is a good course since it can be quite challenging for beginner programmers. For instance, you need to retain all the previous knowledge you obtained each lessons. Also, there isn't only one way to find a solution as you will learn in the final project.

Functions and Classes lab questions were slightly harder than the rest of the programming labs. It would have been so much better if every time I was running the test code to see if I had built the appropriate function/class, what was the output. Not being able to see the output I didn't know what I had to change on my code to make it right so it took me a while to go through these labs.

Also I had some issues with the two IBM's APIs. I couldn't make them run, I'm not sure why.

However, overall it is a great course!