Learner Reviews & Feedback for Java Programming: Solving Problems with Software by Duke University

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First off, it was pretty tough to understand the basics of Java at the very beginning; especially about the systematic configuration of Java - i.e. how project structures are built or how to reference packages, classes or how those things are being stacked etc.. That's because everything is given to you without further details (because it works anyhow if you put all the files in your workspace folder) like IDE and some resource files etc. Literally, you have no chance to learn the things I've mentioned here. So I had to take a full course of Java from YouTube. And then it got way more easier for me and from that moment, everything was just a piece of cake.

I completely agree with those of you guys who insist that it's definitely not a beginner's course, it's at least intermediate course. However, if you decide to take this course, don't give up by some tough parts you're facing because it might be much worse in a real class I suppose. Try to give yourself some time to discover more about Java outside of this course. Java is a great language after all, and I kinda understand now why many people love TypeScript. Type safety features are really nice. :)

Overall, it was a decent course to follow along and learn Java. It was pretty tough from the beginning, even though I had some experiece with JS and Python. Good luck with y'all!

WARNING: this is not a complete beginner level course. I can see the good intention with the Java course from all the instructors, but the exercises could be really challenging. Just passing throught the week 1 feels like a real challenge. I have experience with JavaScript and Python and made several courses in Coursera, and i can say for sure that the learning curve on this course i really high: first you are learning about variables and next you have to handle data from an external source and execute it calling a Java function with the BlueJ environment (first week). A beginner course should give you confidence to handle well the programmming language and from time to time let you try things with the language, not simply trow you to a complex problem and see if you can handle it (because this is learning course, it is suppose to be a guide for your future problems). I give it 3 points because it is well made but the explaining scope should be deeper.

The course is okay, but I was disappointed with a few aspects. First, the use of BlueJay as the coding environment. Outside of a university, I can't imagine anyone uses this. The rationale may be that it "protects the user from the complexities of IntelliJ or Eclipse", but that is flawed reasoning. Shielding someone from the inevitable is actually unproductive, and so I completed the course in IntelliJ by importing the libraries and it was no more difficult to learn. Second, some of the lessons were very peculiar because they literally taught the wrong idiom. One that leaps to mind had to do with the length of an array, and they produced code like "var < array.length() - 4). You would never write such a thing in the real world. You COULD, but you would not. So I felt that many lessons led future programmers down a path they will have to "unlearn" at some later point in their programming experience.

I really liked their seven step approach which I found useful for finding solution to the problems. I also liked the problems in the excercises, because they are not so detailed so lot of own search is needed, BUT the use of their own libraries make this harder because those are also not widely used in the real world.

What I didn't like is their BlueJ environment, because its much harder to use than Eclipse or Netbeans and even not worth the get experience with because in the real world it just doesn't exists. Fortunately you can set your IDE to be used, there are some tutorials in the forums. The other con is the usage of their own libraries, which were designed to help, but make the tasks even harder to accomplish (there are no stackoverflow or any tutorial related) and makes your progress and the outputs far from reality.

This course has very interesting programming examples and the exercises are really challenging. The philosophy of this course is to teach through example problems by explaining and solving them.

The exercises are very well designed and reinforce the concepts very well. But, the later exercises might be a bit hard for an absolute beginner. Nevertheless, once you can successfully solve an exercise set, you can be sure that you have mastered the related concepts.

By the way, this course uses many custom libraries which actually help in writing interesting programs to solve real life problems. The course resource page with detailed documentations is really helpful.

Personally, I enjoyed the course. If you have some basic programming skills and want to solve interesting problems, you should give this course a try.

The staff of this course is really nice, that's the best part of it. Unfortunately, in my opinion this course is not intended for real beginners. From class one I struggled trying to understand what was going on. This may be because instead of just using a typical ide like eclipse or netbeans, they use bluejay, which works different than the rest of ides. In addition, programs used in the course are pretty confusing (If you know 0 Java). I learned most of the basic concepts (classes, methods) for whole week 1 from a single 15 minute video-course from youtube without all the struggling. As I mentioned this only applies if you are a total newbie, if you already know some Java I think you'll be fine.

The course material is, all in all, good. However, I feel some of the latest updates for the JAVA language are not in line with the course material. In short, the content feels a bit outdated. Tutors take long to respond to questions so I would justify that for non-paying users. Finally, the course really challenges you as a beginner and that is good. However, as a paying user, I am expecting to finish each course within the suggested guidelines and not 3 weeks beyond that point. The practice parts for this course take up quite longer than expected. My suggestions will be to update the course material, make the practice parts shorter and get tutors more involved in daily questions.

A good course overall, however, there is little training given on how to debug and identify coding errors. Every mistake needs to be closely looked at, with a lot of trial and error approaches, which were greatly tedious. The time estimations on the last two weeks of assignments, were fairly off from the actual time taken (Given as 10 mins, took 2 hours easily!!).

The course is good, but is not supplemented with the best Java platform to debug and understand, and the quizzes can be very irritating since a small roadblock in coding, can lead to stalling for hours. Without being able to pass the quiz, there is no way to proceed or even fix the code.

It is overall an ok course. Samiliarly as a programming intro class, IMO, the quality, range from the project design and content originzation, is no where close to the IIPP offered by Rice. I do not enjoy this course as much as I did in IIPP.

If you are just interested in getting touch with programming, instead of learning Java like I, go to take IIPP.

I think the first week should appear later, probably should be swapped with week 2 or even 3. The first week class was just super confusing without knowing the basic concept like vairable type declearation and the connection between different methods.

Good Luck!!!

I would not consider myself a "beginner" per say, I have had some previous experience with programming, but I'm definitely not advanced either. I actually thought the videos themselves were great; they could be informative and easy to follow. However, the assignments tended to be way either way too difficult, vague, and/or time-consuming. I definitely would not recommend this to a beginner programmer, but probably would to a more advanced one. I also think using obscure libraries people probably won't be using in the future to teach programming (especially to beginner programmers) is not the brightest idea.