I really want to know if the people giving this course glowing reviews are real people that have taken other programming courses on Coursera. I've done a bunch, and this may be the worst one that I've seen. It's definitely not accessible to beginners. If you can't already program well in another language, this will be unintelligible to you.

The lectures are super easy to follow because they are written like they were designed for audiences of small children. As soon as you go and try to do the assignments, you'll notice that they are very difficult and that watching the videos (even multiple times) does nothing to prepare you for what you are doing. Even the first exercise is brutally hard if you don't already know what you are doing with respect to object oriented programmings patterns. They give you a big file with some prewritten functions and then expect you to be able to write several functions to solve increasingly more complex problems based on the methods from their custom class. There's a very good chance that you'll look at it and just stare blankly because nothing prepares you for what you are expected to do.

The big issue that I can't get over is that although I can sort of stumble my way through things, I don't feel like the course explains how and why things work the way that they do. Why am I doing [insert whatever task]? I have no idea really.

When you realize that you have no idea what is going on, you'll go into the forum and notice that every question you have has been asked by multiple people already, often going back several years. It's obvious that nobody maintains or looks at these discussion forums.

Everyone else has pointed it out, but it's worth saying again: BlueJ is terrible. Why one earth would you force people to use an IDE that nobody else uses? Being forced to use BlueJ alone is a reason to not finish this course. Just don't do it--it's awful.

I also think it's terrible to write custom classes for a course and then make the course completely dependent on them. Why do courses do this? It literally makes most of what we are doing useless outside of the class.

This corse was horrible. I tried very hard for a few months to grasp the concepts and learn at the pace that was required. However, even with a small amount of programming experience, these courses made little to no sense. Also, the duration of the courses was WAY off, I work a full time job, so I was excited about taking this class in my free time after work and for an hour or two on the weekends. However, I found that I had to set aside at least 3-4 hours EACH DAY to accomplish the tasks and try to squeeze information out of instructional videos that just wasn't there. The instructors overcomplicate topics, while speaking in a tone as if they are talking to children. Some of the information that was mentioned I could not find anywhere else online, so I was stuck trying to take notes from the readings and videos, only to get to the quiz and NOTHING lines up with what was taught. They attempt to teach you from the ground up, however, they jump around from topic to topic to where it's impossible to feel like you're actually building on what you have previously learned. Even when I felt like I understood SOME of the information, the quizzes made me feel like a complete failure as the questions and answers are vague.

I came here from Udemy thinking that the courses here were better produced and easier to understand. Man was I wrong. Not only do these videos look dated (when were these videos made? 10 years ago), but the IDE they make you use looks like it was made in the 90s. The instructors DO NOT explain anything in detail, leaving me feeling even more confused than when the video started. Most videos are 5 minutes long and the instructor rushes through the topic almost like they don't want to be doing it. As for the readings, NO ONE learns coding through reading. But even if they did, the lectures you force the students to read are almost in a different language. If I need a dictionary and other YouTube videos to explain what I'm reading, then you've failed in your goal of teaching. When you expect me to pay $50 a month for a course, I expect better quality and production than what I can find for free on YouTube. To anyone reading this.... SAVE YOUR MONEY and find free stuff on YouTube, or pay $12-15 on Udemy and get better lectures from there. To anyone who made these video...DO BETTER! This low quality crap is why people get demoralized when they want to learn code and give up.

1. This cousre hasn't been updated since 2014. That's a pitty 2. Instead of showing studenst how to work with common IDEs like Inellij of Eclipse for java, this course uses some minor unknown IDE. It is a dead end, you won't be very usefull if you don't use the same instruments as your potential colleagues. 3. All the tasks in this course could be solved with java built-in libraries and well-known third party libraries, but for some reason you have to use the proprietary libraries of the universtity. That is a dead end as well. You won't use this libraries in Your career. So I gueas it is simplification indeed, but You just learn unnecessary tools and DON'T learn the tools that for sure would be needed if You choose to be a Java programmer:(

The problem instructions have errors or they are incomplete. I saw that students from 2-4 years ago asked the same questions which they were asking most recently about 1-2 months ago. I think the course staff has missed an opportunity here to improve the documentation and learning experience. Moreover the problem statements for the assignments are vague and ambiguous and you are left scratching your head and browsing through forum posts to figure out where you went wrong. Sorry to say, overall a frustrating experience. The challenge is not in problem solving & coding where is should be, but in trying to untangle confusing and incomplete assignment descriptions.

Constant mistakes appear in the lecture especially reading materials. it can mislead the students.

for example:"As always, when you’re done writing your code in the getLargestSide method, remember to add the code to call the getLargestSide method in the testPerimeter method and add the code to have the system print the output (the same way we did in the last exercise). As always, this is a great time to compile and test your code, and if you run this code using example1.txt as your shape file, then the longest side should be 5.0."

I think answer is not 5. mentor please double check. PS I've found several mistakes in this class. It needs to be improved.

I came here with a understanding of Java, and left absolutely bewildered by what they wanted me to actually accomplish. The lectures were okay, but usually just went on about something, leaving out details to "discuss later" but then need you to know about them to finish the assignments. They have you use things that are from their website, use the horrible code editor of BlueJay when VSCode has far wider use, with far wider companies. And the assignments simply throw you into the deep end with little help or discussions. I would say if you are a beginner, look elsewhere for learning, if you know Java you can try, but don't expect much.

This is not a beginner's course and some questions are not easy as the staff rated, I think is a good course for intermediate people. To answer all the quizzes section you might investigate a lot. We got a life too! Many of us are not in school anymore we have a job and a family. My recommendation, please explain a little more the programming structures like CSVParses is a list or something? I never got it.

PD: The way you use tricky questions is not good to improve programming skills, please put hint at least i.e. " What is the number of boys' names in the file yob1905.csv?"

Regards.

I Just can't understand why the instructors make simple concepts difficult to understand. Take the example of functions video, why you need nesting of function, calling function inside a function when you explaining function for the first time. for God sake this course required no programming knowledge. I learned programming (10 years ago) and yet i am feeling difficulty to understand your complex definition and explanation of a simple language concepts. i am doing this course for the sake of DUKE Certificate otherwise i give this course 1 Star.

The course is just terrible.

It leaves an impression of being unfinished. There's a lot of knowledge missed out from lectures while being expected from the student in the quizzes.

Lecturers themselves have a very vague understanding of how java works and how to code in real life. What they say in some lectures is very misleading and gives either false or just insufficient understanding of certain mechanisms.

The examples are overcomplicated. They demand a full concentration on domain knowledge rather than on programming itself.

Bad organized, too many typos, errors, uncleared and illogic things in the Assignments. I am almost at the end, but now I really quitting this stuff. I liked the Programming C from the Duke, but this one is a total mess. There are no Instructors and Teaching Staff to talk to in the Forums, just some Mentors, but that is not a big help, this Course is total left alone from the Authors. Andy Hilton is a good guy, should read the discussions and correct the errors!

I like the difficulty of this course, it's challenging. HOWEVER, the course materials have a lot of minor errors that cost you time to find the right files to use for your quiz, at least for Week 1. It also happened in the last class which was the HTML,CSS, and JAVA. It took me at least an hour to try to debug my codes but it turned out the reading guide wasn't consistent with the codes they provided, which caused the failure.

Beginning (course 1 in the Java specialization) was promissing but very fast the concepts became not understandable. Videos explain less and less but tasks become more and more complicated. In my opinion this course (and all Java specialization) is not ment for the beginners. This doesn't explain the most basic concepts a person that doesn't have IT background should start with.

Does very little to actually help you learn JAVA. Explains nothing about why the language works as it does.. Also it insists on you using their libraries and programming environments. You spend perhaps 20% of your time actually practicing coding, and the rest is wasted in libraries you will never use again. Such a waste

If you are a real beginner like me (having zero or little programming knowledge) and your time is limited, I think this course (or the specialisation) is not suitable for you. The assignments and quizzes are very time consuming. One week I spent literally 30+ hours writing and debugging codes for just one quiz.

Some algorithms the instructors implement are very inefficient (searching through a whole string three times when what we want could be right at the start).

Also making their own simpler data types rather than just teaching the java built in data types seems like an odd choice. Learners want to learn java!

Assignments are too advanced compared to the videos given. 7 minutes was spend showing how to code. However the entire final quiz on week 1 expects you to code new things that which were never shown in videos without any help. This was not the case in the 1st class in this series.

There are to much requirements expeted to solve this course. It isn't for beginner, because there are no explanations about the basics.

You can learn the Seven-Step-Approach, but not how to translate the human language into Java. The first example is to complex for a beginner.

I think, it does have enough information and does not good explanation video quality also poor. Using BlueJ which I don't like because in the real world no one using BlueJ. I am looking for a deep learning concept which I could not find in this course!

Using custom libraries is very bad for students. We must study java core not some custom libraries.

BlueJ also a bad choise, even the notepad or the vim are better for understanding the compilation process. Also there is no peer reviewed assignments.

Poor, very poor course, worse course structure. Instructor hasn't put any thoughts in how they should strucutre this course.Cover no basics, assumes lots of thing and term this course as beginner for Java where actually there is no Java taught.

Poorly designed and explained. You do not really gain much knowledge from this course.

I would not recommend my friends and basically others to take this course. There are far better courses out there for much cheaper prices.

Programmed instruction course with no human contact whatever. Broken software? Missing files for assignments? There is no response to problem reports, and all the human customer support of Facebook.

This course is not a beginner course and can't understand what was the course motive to teach a student. For me, it was a total waste of time. Full of disappointment!!!

Complete lack of support from instructors. Questions were not clearly answered and only led to more confusion. Instructions for assignments contradictory to lessons.