Actually, before I start this course I had not a good idea about OOP concept such as constructors, HashMap.now I have fair confidence about that. thank you duke university making such an arrangement.

The course was pretty challenging (and occasionally frustrating) for a novice programmer, but doable.

I enjoyed the course, and came away with a greater understanding of computers and programming.

Despite having some tedious assignments, this course impressed me. It taught me the new topics very well. I liked working on the last few assignments. I would recommend it to learners looking for a good course to learn Java and it's applications.

Good intro to ArrayLists, HashMaps and HashSets, but assignments are very repetitive.

Great task for beginner.

It's not the perfect course (I would rate it with 4.5) but it is one of the best courses you can have that reassures that certificate corresponds to your learning. If you want truly to learn, be familiar with java's simple processes, obtain some computational ability and not just add a certificate to your resume then this course is for you.

The weak part of this course is that the IDE proposed is not so easy to use and you will not use it again after this course. It may also stall your programming. (Most of the time it was so slow to test some things and simple commands I had to open jshell also.)

This course has simple but interesting datasets, wisely chosen for newbies in programming. The challenges given are simple yet capable to add new skills to the student. The student won't have to search the net to find extra information. Everything is in the lectures and watching the lectures and probably some testing will be more than enough to complete the tasks and simultaneously obtain the skill. The challenges are many, though sometimes tiring, and practice ungraded questions make sure that the graded ones will be answered.

If you already know java and seek specialty, this course is not for you. If you want to learn java as a first or a second programming language probably this could be an ideal course.

The course was good for developing routine problem solving skills, as in the first course "Java Programming: Solving Problems with Software". However, the emphasis was supposed to be on Arrays, Lists and Structured data, and I do not think that was the case. These topics were mentioned tangentially to solving the class problems, rather than being the focus.

In summary, I could have learned as much about Arrays, Lists, and Structured Data in about 30 minutes of Googling as I did in 4 weeks of this course. However, it wasn't a total loss, as I became more proficient at the basics, simply because of the exercises.

This course was very hard but the idea of teaching Java Programming with the application of cryptography was a magnificent one. Cryptography kept me motivated to complete the course as it is an interesting study. Hats off to the teachers for organizing an interesting course and for teaching it really well.

Good and practical training approach to solve real worlds problems. Assignments and quizzes are quite challenging and interesting. Greatly motivates us towards programming and problem solving skills.

Needs to talk more about the theory and how the data structures work (HashSet, HashMap, ArrayList). What are their efficiencies? None of this was discussed in the class.

This course was quite challenging for me but the feeling that i have now after completing it is priceless. It gave me more confidence to start a career as a Junior Java Developer. What seemed to be impossible when i started this specialisation is now possible. Thanks to the instructors and thanks to Coursera indeed.

FUN!

videos are good and course is helpful. However, no staff working for forum, so if anyone has any problem, no staff is helping you.

the reading part has many errors and unneccessary methods

This course barely touches Arrays, Lists, and Hashmaps (the only structured data they teach), and it is mainly focused on solving repetive mini projects which are very poorly taught. You must use their custom libraties and their IDE which are horrible, and most of the quizzes are just a repetitve as the mini projects.

DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE unless you are really bored and need to practice even poorly made assignments.

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.

it gets repetitive after week 2. it becomes unhelpful learning new concepts. I was expecting to learn more about important points of arrays and lists (such as erasing from an iterable, or null exceptions), than repeating similar practice for weeks.

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.

So far the best course in the specialization. Thoroughly enjoyed doing all the programming assignments. The last project was fun because it felt like finally applying the principles you learn and building something out of it.

I don't think there's much to complain about with this course. The only one that the object-oriented nature of Java is underutilized so far. Although I gotta say this course takes a big leap from its predecessor with respect to OOP. The multiple classes and their functioning together gives you a nice taste of how OOP works at a high level. Of course, there's much more for OOP to offer that isn't covered here (inheritance, polymorphism, overloading, static methods, error & exception handling in Java to name a few).

One of the good courses I've encountered for learning programming paradigms. Personally, unlike any other course I take, I did not have to make handwritten notes for this one. The instructors were clear and concise and thus there was no need to write down. Most importantly, this is because you *really* learn by doing so there's no need to pen down everything. In case you forget a method, you've always got the documentation to refer to!

On a final note, take this course, you will enjoy it.

Honestly, I think the course from Duke is better than UC San Diego, at least the goal of the course at Duke is quite clear, it helps me think to solve the problems that the assignment poses, It's basically programming thinking, and it's essential to whatever language or framework you're going to use in the future to solve problems, it's a good course, as for UC San Diego (3rd course in this major - OOP in Java) , they use a rather old technology that is Applet and it doesn't work with new version of Java, and dozens of other bugs with OpenGL, Canvas included and I still can't fix it, instead of focusing on OOP, solving and designing, organizing code based on OOP, now we have to fix errors on IDE, Applet, OpenGL, Processing (a library like JavaFX, Java Swing) just to run the code and do the exercises, it took me a long time to fix the unrelated errors that come from the IDE, the operating system you use (I use linux and couldn't fix it to make it work at all, I couldn't find any information about the bug on gg,stackoverflow to fix it) , quite disappointed about the 3rd course in this major