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

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 In short, the content feels a bit outdated.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.

It is a nice course for people who are just starting to program to feel the power of writing software for solving real world problems. The assignments posted are challenging enough and shed light on some of the reasoning necessary to write working software. But it does not encourage to create custom methods to help keep the code clean, sometimes solving some of the assignments following the instructions led to many 'for' and 'if' nests which made the code difficult to read and boring to write.

It starts off well, but week 2 is ridiculously rough. After getting past that, I struggled with the Miniproject, because, again, it was structured poorly. I had a number of software problems with FileResource and BlueJ, and of course, the mentors were never available to help. While I eventually was able to finish the course, I would've appreciated more guidance. I really enjoyed Course 1, but this was a waste of time and money.

Some of the important details are missing when i try to do the quiz. For example, when i am trying to do the assignment i do not know how to iterate over all the data files because neither the videos nor the reading info gave me the answer i need so i have to google it. However, i still learn a lot from this course, too. Great classes to take and sometimes it gets a little bit tricky.

The content was useful and I do feel a foundation is being set.

The area where I think the course fell short is on the support we got from mentors or instructors in the forum, basically null - pun intended. There are some points where it's easy to fall into a rabbit hole, like I did. Without support, a simple challenge supposed to take a few minutes can turn into hours, days.

5 years outdated and the use of a third party library made by Duke University is not ideal. We should learn libraries that are in the original Java API, not third party libraries that can not be reused in our professional coding career. Also, the assignments may be to difficult for beginners but even if you some experience of C language you will do great.

I dint like the software used for the entire program. The theory should have been told in rather good way. prof. Rodger was good at coding. she coded step by step and practically. the other prof who use to code was just running up like hell. But i was good experience to be a part of Michigan University.

It started fine, but then turned out it's a somewhat weird course. First of all, who uses Oracle Java IDE in the middle of 2010th? Secondly, the course doesn't really follow the OOP and Functional programming guidelines. Overall it's worth it if you are a complete newbie

I really dont need this course. I just wanted to take a free trial for 7 days and i checked that it i was charged 76 for a month. I really need a refund. It's only been one day after my trial ended. Please leave me a reply. Email: aroy3452@gmail.com

I consider this course of medium quality in terms of teaching style (somewhat narrative-like), the difficulty of assignments (lots of repetitive code writing - not very challenging), and student engagement (I feel lots of code was given out).

This course was overall a good course and taught me a lot of things, but the discussion page wasn't that helpful, as the questions were not being answered regularly. It is for this reason i am giving this course 3 out of 5 stars.

The course focuses on the logic behind programming and the assignments are very helpful to exercise what we have learnt. It would be more helpful if the course focuses on the syntax of Java programming also.

Course is more focused on using already provided packages. And also course should be designed for most popular IDE like eclipse, so that beginner get introduced to tools which is widely used in industry.

People must have general idea about the Data types/class/methods/objects/libraries. So, the course is somewhere between beginner & intermediate. But anyway, the instructors explained well!

Not for a beginner level at all , The estimated times for the exercises is so much less than the required the exercises require hours ,, week 2 is difficult and require alot of time:|

I am using eclipse to perform my java coding and this whole course was on bluej. So I was having some issue because of some built in method in the CSV section. Rest all was 5 star :)

Why must we be forced to use BlueJ? Also, from explanation to problems the learning curve is slightly steep. Would be better with more practical walkthrough coding examples first.

The content is good but they use the 3rd party Java libraries, not the standard one so It makes it pretty much useless as you don't get to learn anything in Java programming.

This course is definitely not for beginners. But people with little knowledge on JAVA or coding of any other language will find this useful. Assignments are really helpful

More technical aspects could have been touched upon. Details on how to implement code on any java platform using inbuilt java libraries and several others.

There exist some sort of help for solving programming.However, those bad quiz as well as not so comprehensive courses design totally ruin it.

it is so hard for beginners. and some techniques which i can not understand i took long time for that . but presentation were so good