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Pros:

The course was well-structured which made it easy to follow.

The lecturers were professionals and they explained the educational materials with numerous details.

The assignments covered the provided material appropriately.

Cons:

For some sections, the teaching pace was not fast enough since the lecturers have assumed (absolute) zero background in programming and no familiarity with algorithms. For those who only want to fill a few minor gaps in their understanding (such as myself), most of the videos are too lengthy and can be skipped.

Some of the programming assignments were either erroneous or unclear which could make you stop for longer than necessary.

Conclusion:

If you have started learning Python using a textbook (and hence have a solid foundation in mind), you might want to skip this course and go to the next one in this specialization. However, if you have learned the basics of Python through "try and error" then this course might provide you with a better foundation and help you learn faster in the future.

The presentation is very elementary, as seems appropriate for students with little or no programming experience. I didn't realize this when I signed up for the course; I've got a couple of decades of programming under my belt and probably would have understood the substance if presented in a few hours of time. For me it was very boring and hard to keep my attention on it. For this reason I'm not giving it 5 stars. But, considering the target audience it seems presented pretty well, and the various practice exercises, along with the video material and accompanying text covering the same material, does a good job of making sure each point is well understood. What I did get out of this course, and which I value, is that it made me spend a fair bit of time thinking about Python, and trying out code and getting my code checked. I think it's a pretty good course though I advise people with a lot of programming experience to see if there is another course that goes at a faster pace.

The course materials does a good job of explaining the material. However, there is a lot of redundancy with the assignments within the readings and the material in the videos. If you watch a video prior to the reading, the video will give you give you the answers to the practice problems within the reading. This takes away from the students ability to solve some of the problems on their own. Furthermore, the graded assignments will sometimes have the exact same questions that were in the reading. I suggest that the instructors within the videos create practice problems that are not in the readings to demonstrate the course concepts. Other than a few of the assignments having incorrectly worded instructions, the course was fine.

All-in-all it is an excellent course, even for experienced programmers. If you have programmed in other languages, the concepts will be very familiar. The course is very well organized and provides you with the essentials. If you plan on taking other courses with the University of Michigan, it gives you a good opportunity to experience the Runestone Interactive environment.

The only complaint I have is that the instructors work through the problems in the text before offering the student the opportunity to attempt them. It almost feels as though you're cheating when you work through the problems, because you already know the answer.

It's fine, I would just like to see more coding assignments, even if they are redundant. I really want to do a lot of exercises and there weren't that many in this first section. Hopefully, they pick up in the next sections...Also, if anyone is reading this can you please include references on what to look up for some of the more challenging problems? As with another recent class I took, with another Univ. I am dismayed by the fact there is no "if stuck go watch/read/ XYZ again".....This also keeps the instructors 'honest' like they did provide everything we need to solve the problems --some times I feel they haven't.

Overall I found the course to be informative. I already had a fair bit of Python experience but I still learned some things which made it worth my while to finish. The reason I did not give it 5 stars is because I would have liked more hands on coding challenges. Almost all of the questions were either multiple choice or required 1 or 2 lines of code. I would have liked more questions like the final that required coding from scratch using what was learned from multiple lessons to accomplish a more complicated task.

Great course for absolute beginners! Very well structured and paced, just the right amount of work planned for each week. Course instructors are professional and competent. I especially enjoyed working with the interactive textbook provided.

However I believe the detailed video explanation for many exercises are not needed by every learner. In my opinion the explanation videos could be separated from the main course videos, and made as optional for students after they've done the exercises.

This 1st course of the "Python 3 Programming" specialization by University of Michigan is more in depth than the 1st course of the specialization of 'Python For Everybody' by University of Michigan. This course is less in depth than the single course with no specialization of Learn to Program: The Fundamentals by University of Toronto. Therefore I am only giving it 4 stars. I recommend the last course mentioned to get the best head start at learning python.