Overall: I felt this course was useful but pretty time-consuming. The course had relatively limited taught material and relied a lot on searching & self-studying. If you have a fair amount of time it is a good choice.

Pros: You learn through doing assignments which are well supported by mentors/community. Also, you get used to studying through googling problems and learning from websites such as Stackoverflow.

Cons: Whilst this learning method definitely had its merits, it could be quite time-consuming for someone seeking to gain introductory-level skills quickly. You could find yourself in situations where you spend hours searching for something quite elementary and could easily have been taught to you, which could be frustrating. I personally think this course could be improved by adding a bit more small quizzes for beginners to play around with the basics, before requiring them to self-learn through searches.

I've learned a lot in this course. Nevertheless I only give it two stars. Here's the reason.

In the last few weeks I've spent an incredible number of hours researching details on the Pandas library online and trying to solve the tasks and conquer the autograder. I already knew quite a lot about Pandas before starting the course and I've had a good knowledge on Regex beforehand. But I really stood no chance to solve the assignments in the recommended three hours. It always took me at least five, in the case of assignment 3 even more than ten hours. Now I'm stuck with assignment 4 and despite having invested a lot of time I'll just give up feeling frustrated on confusing instructions, time consuming data cleaning and too difficult tasks for my level and somehow feeling not smart enough to finish a course labeled as "Introduction"

The lectures were essentially the instructor reading from the provided Jupyter notebooks at _very_ high speed. You can slow down the video, but then you get a weirdly artificial drone that is hard to listen to. And the lectures jump briskly from topic to topic without providing any context, or advice about writing good programs. The assignments took WAY more time than estimated because (a) there was a lot of self-learning via StackOverflow (b) the auto-grader is very very finicky. (It would have been useful to have a quick demo video showing how to approach the assignments and deal with the auto-grader).

That said, the people (TAs?) helping on the forums were very helpful. And I learned quite a bit, but mostly on my own.

Compared to the previous course I have taken at University of Michigan the content was ok but how it was taught I didn't like. Just reading rapidly the text of the Jupyter Notebook is not enough from my point of view. Ok you can find out the stuff yourself but why take then this course and don't go directly to stack overflow.

You just get weird replies from the auto grader and search through the forum to get any idea why you didn't pass. And if you pass, you will never know if your solution was the proper way to solve this task....

The assignments are much more difficult than what is covered in the class. The teaching speed is too fast without enough PPT slides. The class coding demonstration is also too fast. The lecturer should either teach more in class or make the assignments easier. Assignment 3 and assignment 4 need a lot of independent studies of the functions in pandas library. If the assignments need a lot of independent studies, what is the meaning of the teaching in class?

I agree with some reviews saying that course was mostly limited to self-learning. Videos were rushed and learning mostly limited to self-studying. Assignments descriptions were confusing and not well explained, not to mention that it takes hours to figure out why correct solution is not accepted. I'd say writing code (correctly) takes 4 hours but then you need 8 hours to figure out why your answer is not accepted.

Poorly worded questions (that are mentioned throughout the discussion board), older version of pandas and the course resources don't help you with course. Get ready to 'learn' by looking in StackOverflow or reading the volumes upon volumes of python/pandas documentation. In other words, expect to spend 15 hours a week per week (obviously it will vary)

Lectures do not reflect what is required to complete the assignments. Much of the learning is left to independent study by the student. Assignment questions are too vague and frequently require parsing through class discussions to determine the answer the auto-grader is looking for.

The lectures are not good. They go too quickly. They're about 5 minutes long, but you have to stop every minute or 30 seconds and rewind to understand what the instructor is saying. He just goes way too fast, and it's very frustrating. Really ruins the experience.

The teaching was sparse and assignments got very difficult very quickly. An inordinate amount of time was spent Googling to get past each step due to poor foundations. I learned more in a much shorter time from more gradual and concise YouTube tutorials.

There is only few minutes taught video courses each week, although the reading materials and topics are quite interesting. The learning of python coding rely heavily on your own trial and error, which you could do even without this course.

The level of course content and assignments is not at all similar. The course contents need to be revised, seems like the professor assumes we know everything about the topic. Also the teaching speed is extremely fast. Very Disappointed!

With great tasks, lectures, there're terrible assignments, w/o explanation, multiple interpretations. Ttest task in Module 4, is really a hard task, w/o any explanation, could have moved it in a different course.

The instructor seems like he's reading out points of a book. No proper explanation of tools used followed by assignments so hard compared to what being taught in classes

not bad... theres a big mistake in the regex video.

assignments don't really match the lectures.

Without Corey Schafer and Sentdex on youtube I would've quit.

It never felt like the material was covered in enough depth to give me confidence in the ability to do the assignments.

Starts off well, then escalates way too quickly. Assignment 4 is incredibly complex and has poor guidance notes.

The Assignments are made too careless, spend too much time just to understand what is required.

I really don't like the way of explaining the process

the worst course i have ever seen

The assignments were way more complicated than the examples used during the lectures.

Too difficult, poor connection between lectures and assignments

Insanely fast paced course.. Needs Improvement

Very fast paced and poorly taught.

This is in fact the worst course so far. Mainly because of auto grader. Here are my reasons.

Actually I did not complete the course at all. But I suddenly got a message saying that I have completed the course. I was working on the first problem of the 4th assignment. I did a provisional submission to see if my answer was right. Auto grader reported the grade for the 3rd assignment and said that I have passed the course. Any submission I did after that was not graded at all.

The assignments are not very clear. Looks like I had a older version of the questions while others had a different version. I was stuck in a particular problem because auto grader did not give me a clear feedback as to why I was incorrect. I wasted too much time on this already.

The assignments require too much research outside what is covered in the videos. I don't feel that is right. The assignment requires that we research on Stack Overflow and Pandas documentation. I strongly feel that such activities should be performed only outside the course work when we try to solve real world problems. Course assignments should be reasonably given based only the materials covered in video. This was taking too much time.

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The discussion forums are not giving clear hints. When we are stuck in a problem, we are not able to proceed further. I still son't know the answers for certain problems because the coordinators do not explain the answers well. When we complete assignments we don't get to see the instructor's solution.

The video instructions were too fast paced. The instructors do not pause and explain critical aspects of the code.

Overall I am very disappointed with this course. There are much better videos on Youtube and Lynda than this . I am sorry. I never thought it would be this bad. The first course on Python from University of Michigan was really very good.

1.     Recommend immediate termination and removal of this course due to the disservice to the field. The course is so horrible it convinces students that data science is not for them.

2.     It appears that Brooks has only superficial understanding the material himself, as he is unable to explain it.

3.     Lectures are waste of time, consisting of watching Brooks speaking as someone types what he says into the files already downloaded.

4.     No relationship between lectures and homework assignments.

5.     Repeated references to promote Brooks’s book. Lectures are so useless, his book likely only suitable for lining birdcages.

6.     Repeated acknowledgment of inadequacy of lecture material with Stack Overflow cited as primary resource for learning.

7.     Homework assignments

a.     Incredibly poorly written, as if student inability to complete them is the principal objective.

b.     Auto-grader errors incomprehensible and fail to indicate which part of the assignment has issue.

c.      Auto-grader reports errors that are actually auto-grader processing problems. TA in discussion forums attempts to interpret, without success.

8.     Discussion forums

a.     TA complaints not enough time to support students

b.     TA agreement assignments poorly written

i.     Attempt to balance helping students without disclosing actual solution, with infrequent success

ii.     Repeated apologies and responds there are notes on where to improve (dated over a year ago, no changes made)

9.     I have been programming since yellow paper tape. I know a terrible course in my field when I see one.

With so many negative reviews, why are the problems in this course not addressed?