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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Getting Started with Go by University of California, Irvine

4.6
stars
2,347 ratings

About the Course

Learn the basics of Go, an open source programming language originally developed by a team at Google and enhanced by many contributors from the open source community. This course is designed for individuals with previous programming experience using such languages as C, Python, or Java, and covers the fundamental elements of Go. Topics include data types, protocols, formats, and writing code that incorporates RFCs and JSON. Most importantly, you’ll have a chance to practice writing Go programs and receive feedback from your peers. Upon completing this course, you'll be able to implement simple Go programs, which will prepare you for subsequent study at a more advanced level....

Top reviews

JP

Apr 4, 2020

Great intro. If you already know the basics, you probably don't need this course though. Not much of a deep dive, more of a "skim the surface" type course. Week 4 on IO was the most beneficial for me.

AN

Oct 23, 2020

Very detailed, nice introduction to golang's basic concepts. Might need to google to find better ways to handle some requirements of the assignments, but overall a cool programming language to learn.

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1 - 25 of 584 Reviews for Getting Started with Go

By Donguk L

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Jan 23, 2019

I think it would have been more convinient if the coding assigntments were graded automatically.

By Alec J

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May 18, 2019

I like the instructor, and the material was certainly worthwhile, but I do have some constructive criticism. 1. There were too many typos in the lecture slides. Spending my time debugging the professor's code strikes me as counterproductive. 2. There are a lot of things you have to look up on your own in order to complete the assignments. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the instructor could be clear about this at the outset. 3. The whole peer-grading scheme is ridiculous. If I went to my local university, took a course, and the professor said "you all have to grade each others' assignments," I'd be righteously upset about this. I don't see why the Coursera platform is inherently that much different so as to justify this absurd practice. Why should I trust that the other students are equipped and responsible enough to grade anything, particularly something they're learning at the same time as me?

By Igor K

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Nov 6, 2018

I would not recommend this course. It has many syntax errors. Assessments often rely on a subjects which are not explained yet. Assessments have misleading descriptions. Does not worth your money.

By Lorenzo N

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Jun 16, 2019

Very, very basic. They say the course is for people with knows other programming languages, but the expected knowledge is very low. For example, a very long explanation about variable scope is for absolute beginners. If you are proficient in any other language like C, C# or Java, you have listened to this explanation N-times in your life and the course is probably too slow paced for you.

By Hugh S

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Jun 1, 2020

some of the best, clearest, easiest to understand explanations I've ever come across. Other computer science instructors should do this course. not for them to learn Go, but to learn how to explain.

By Ariel Y

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Dec 18, 2018

Very shallow. Only the bare basics are covered. Some embarrassing errors in the code presented in the lectures.

Nice as an intro for a complete novice, who has just bare minimum programming experience. Otherwise - for a paid course - doesn't worth the time nor the money.

By Kruti D P

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May 20, 2020

Worst course I have ever taken. If not for the certificate I would not have taken this course. Lots of syntax errors and utterly stupid peer reviews. If you want to actually learn something go to youtube or see actual documentation

By John G

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Jul 29, 2019

The video instruction is very superficial.

For example, in the video on variables, the instructor says something like, "the Go garbage collector is fast, and that's all you need to worry about." I disagree. The details of garbage collection are important factors in understanding if a language is appropriate for a particular use case, especially when performance and throughput matter.

I would expect a more thorough discussion of the implementation of the language in a course provided by a major university.

By Carlos E C M

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Apr 9, 2019

Good intro to golang basics, if you are not familiar with golang this would be a nice course for you.

Things to consider if you're paying for this course: The topics are very basic, slides may contain some typos, the video lectures are not updated so erros may be there for a while, the course staff do not respond in the forums, its a peer graded course and many people complain about it, I found myself a little dissapointed about it.

By Chenzhe X

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Oct 7, 2018

Too much typos in the codes, misleading in some cases

By Andreas M

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Nov 4, 2019

Love it! Not only is the subject really interesting, but Prof Harris is really good in teaching programming in a nonchalant way, almost like a good buddy sitting next to you at the coffee table, teaching you how to code.

I definitely recommend this course!

By John P

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Apr 5, 2020

Great intro. If you already know the basics, you probably don't need this course though. Not much of a deep dive, more of a "skim the surface" type course. Week 4 on IO was the most beneficial for me.

By Balys A

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Sep 15, 2019

Loved the lecturer!

By 김민기

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Nov 27, 2018

assignment requirement is not clear.there is wrong syntax in video.

By Sajid A

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Mar 5, 2021

A very good course for intermediate GO learners. I won't recommend this course to absolute beginners, It will be very helpful if you learn some basics of the GO language before taking the course

By Rob S

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Dec 13, 2018

The material and pace are good. My only complaint is with the peer review grading system. I've taken other courses (Odersky's Scala series) where grading is automated by unit tests. Given Golang's high reliance on testing in practice, that would seem to be a much better approach here.

By David L

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Jun 16, 2019

Negatives:

Not an intermediate course, more like a beginner course for me. Too much background info which is not go related eg concurrency/parallelism explaination

Examples are not good: bad variable and function names, non-practical or even confusing/misleading

Positives:

Important topics are covered, explainations are ok (but could be better)

By Dmytro D

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Nov 18, 2023

It's not much of a course. The lectures were very surface level and covered not enough Go-specific things or best practices. The programming assignments were alright but I wish they just used automated testing instead of peer reviews. To be hones you'd be better off doing the official Tour of Go and reading the docs if you already have programming experience. And if you're new to programming this is not going to give you the necessary depth.

By Abhishek S

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Jun 18, 2019

Should be more indepth. Standard library which were missed out and are important should be introduced like reflection, time, net, io, etc and that too in detail. I think concepts introduced must be strengthened using real world scenarios as well. Please introduce more concepts like profiling, memory management web development as part of this specialization via new courses.

By Aaron B

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Jan 20, 2022

This course was a mess. Slides full of syntax errors, assignments require understanding not yet delivered, poor organization of content within video lectures, and so much more. If this was 10 bucks on Udemy I'd understand, but for a university level course, this is a bit sad.

By Daniel S

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May 16, 2022

The video lectures are very superficial. For the final module, I didn't bother wasting my time watching the lectures. This whole course can be completed by skipping to the graded assignment, reading the prompt, and then searching online for how to solve various pieces of the problem needing solved, e.g. "how to take input in go", "how to parse a file in go", "golang json marshal mapping". There are numerous time wasting mistakes, ambiguities, and critical omitions throughout the course which have been reported and remain unfixed for years and they are infuriating.

The prompts themselves are often unclear, with either outright mistakes or ambiguous specifications. Again, these mistakes have been reported, many of them reported years ago, and have still not been addressed. And we're talking about mistakes that would take 5 minutes for the professor to fix. Just view the discussion forums for numerous examples. The prompts also often require knowledge that was not covered during the lectures, even superficially.

The video lectures often spend too much time on information you could easily obtain from a quick online search but fail to go in-depth on topics where I actually need a lecture to help me understand a topic. The lectures also run too fast, glossing over tons of details and complex topics in oftentimes less than 10 minutes.

If you have a friend or a senior co-worker that can just create some program prompts for you, like "make a program that can prompt a user for a name and address, store the data in a map, marshal it into JSON, and then print the JSON", and then you go teach yourself how to accomplish that, then you already have what this course will provide for you. If you need anything beyond that, then look elsewhere.

By ardawan i

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Oct 30, 2019

This course is the only talks and powerpoint slides, there is absolutely no code, monitor screen sharing, etc.

The courses talk about fundamentals and computer science stories. The entire specialization focus is less than 50% on the Go language itself. No Go mod, No libraries, No coding...

For instance, The professor is about to explain a new thing and suddenly remember forgot to mention something before so he jumps to the missing point and then jumps back to continue. HARD to follow up...

The quizzes have many typos/duplicates. That makes you fail!

Overall strongly I do NOT suggest to waste your money or time on this specialization on Coursera.

By Tyler B

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Apr 24, 2022

The lessons don't cover much depth, nor are there great demo/examples. Too much talking, not enough coding. The tests are not aligned with the lessons. Peer grading is ridiculoud. Several times i was scored poorly based off the preferences of the reviewer, not whether the code executed and performed as specificied. I resubmitted the exact same file and received a 100%. WTF? I do not reccomend.

By Shahan A

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Jul 24, 2021

terrible. the instructor skips over many important concepts needed to do the assignments. a little introduction to Scanf and other funcs necessary to do the assignments would have been nice. In order to do this course I didn't have to know Python, I had to have already known Go. the lectures had little relation to the assignments and I had to already know Go to do the assignments

By Andrew N

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Oct 23, 2020

Very detailed, nice introduction to golang's basic concepts. Might need to google to find better ways to handle some requirements of the assignments, but overall a cool programming language to learn.