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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Using Python to Access Web Data by University of Michigan

4.8
stars
43,904 ratings

About the Course

This course will show how one can treat the Internet as a source of data. We will scrape, parse, and read web data as well as access data using web APIs. We will work with HTML, XML, and JSON data formats in Python. This course will cover Chapters 11-13 of the textbook “Python for Everybody”. To succeed in this course, you should be familiar with the material covered in Chapters 1-10 of the textbook and the first two courses in this specialization. These topics include variables and expressions, conditional execution (loops, branching, and try/except), functions, Python data structures (strings, lists, dictionaries, and tuples), and manipulating files. This course covers Python 3....
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High quality content

(256 Reviews)

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(217 Reviews)

Top reviews

SM

Jun 18, 2020

This course was really interesting and did a good job introducing complicated topics in usefully simplified form. It was a pleasure to listen to the instructor and I got everything I wanted out of it.

ML

Jun 16, 2017

Excellent course with in depth explanations. It is well structured. It learn to access Web Data from very basics to optimum level. It help me to understand details of using Python to Access Web Data.

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26 - 50 of 7,921 Reviews for Using Python to Access Web Data

By 赵泽民

Jul 5, 2019

The course materials provided are very clear and useful.

By Hakan T

Dec 31, 2019

Horrible TAs. They should all be changed. They are extremely rude and annoying.

By Kaida Z

Jul 3, 2017

This course is great to introduce you to regular expression, HTML, XML and JSON. Based on this course, you may dive into many other materials to further learning how to use python to access web data.

By Javier

Apr 5, 2023

TL, dr: Flawed course in comparison to the first two ones.

The course introduces new concepts, more or less technical to understand what's going on when you try to access web data from an external application, such as a programming language. If you're new to programming like myself, you could feel a bit overwhelmed at times, but with a little patience and dedication, you end up understanding the whole process and why it could be useful to use code to access web data. The instructor is helpful and does a good job in this part.

However, I have two great objections to the course:

The first one is that there is no explanations about libraries and modules. The course relies heavily in them not only for the assignments but for the lectures. If the specialization claims to be for any person without programming language but don't include any explanation about these features, is missing a crucial part for the students to know what they're doing. And sorry but just hearing the instructor says 'type this and it will work' is not a valid explanation, at least for me.

The second one is about the course structure. Because it explains so many new concepts, some of them are treated only at surface level, without providing a deep explanation. I wouldn't have minded do two or three more weeks or even an additional course if this would have given a better understanding of concepts such XML, sockets, REST architecture or JSON. In addition to this, at times some code are explained after need it to do previous assignments so at not few times, I ended up looking for solution on the internet or copy/paste the code provided in the assignment because I couldn't understand what I was doing.

On a side note, although I enjoyed week 6 the most, the videos about APIs usage must be reviewed. Google geocoding requires an API key now so when you type the code and try to access data, it returns an error. The one about Twitter API is directly useless in which you need a Twitter account (I don't have one and don't have plans to have it in the future) to follow the lecture.

By Matt M

Mar 4, 2016

Took the first two courses which were fine but this one started off poorly and just got worse, unfortunately. I'm wondering if I can get my money back.

By Minhao S

Jun 29, 2019

teaching staff.......no good, helpless

By SHARATH C

May 28, 2020

explanation was not up to the mark.

By Asem N

May 23, 2019

really hard assignments

By Misha S

Nov 30, 2018

Time wasting & rubish

By J A M

Dec 23, 2015

Yet another excellent course... My prior reviews were so ravingly positive that I now feel compelled to offer a very minor area of potential improvement: Dr. Chuck might have considered going a bit deeper into Geojson API and perhaps even done a second API. Also there were some glitches in the Geojson assignment: My python Spyder was left frozen a couple times before I got things working.

I understand that some students would have complained due to the length of Week 6, but if you requested the simple first assignment completion after the first 10 minutes of video lecture, you could have snuck in two concrete API assignments later on. Also, you could have had a Week 7 with the second API and alternate Web Access assignments. In sum, I was left wishing I had a bit more API experience.

Nevertheless, I give this class 4.75 stars, which rounds up to the usual 5 stars. I've completed three of Dr. Chuck's classes and I'm on the fourth. Dr. Chuck is the incarnation of the super MOOC professor. Long live Dr. Chuck!

By Michael O

Oct 29, 2019

Disclaimer: If you're taking the Python for Everybody Specialization, I HIGHLY suggest starting the Python 3 Programming Specialization (also University of Michigan) after completing the first two courses. Get to Week 2 of Course 1 in that specialization and then start Course 3 of Python for Everybody.

I really appreciate the University of Michigan and the staff involved in providing these courses.I completed the first two courses of Python for Everybody and started the Python 3 Programming Specialization (another University of Michigan specialization) before taking this course.Unlike the first two courses in this specialization, I do not feel like I've committed the code to memory. Especially when it comes to XML. I can comfortably talk someone through the steps of working with XML/JSON, but would likely need to look up the syntax to code it (which I hope was the intention of the course).

By Miguel A V C

Mar 29, 2021

I had low expectations for this course as the most helpful reviews complained that content was rushed and assignments were difficult. However, I found this course really enjoyable and easy. I think that people is complaining because they were spoon-fed too much on courses 1 and 2 of this specialisation. I only had to look for help on the forums once, and to be honest the teaching staff is a wee bit unhelpful and often confuses people more.

My background: I started python from scratch with this specialisation and only have 20 months of experience in programming with MATLAB.

By Avisek G

Sep 13, 2017

The course teaches the basics of how to interact with the internet using Python. The course is simple, well explained, has great interviews with people who were part of the creation of the internet.

By Ichiro H

Jul 8, 2019

Great course for introduction to parse Web Data. However, google map and twitter API seems to be changed a lot, so those examples won't work any more. It took me a few days to figure that out and felt a bit stressful. Hope re-recording take place soon so that many other students would not stuck there.

By Nicolas C

May 18, 2019

I think that the average user will be overexerted by the complexity of this course after week 4. You have to consider that most participants barely have experience in programming at all and I am pretty sure that some will get lost, lose interest and definitely will not be able to reproduce this kind of web scraping for their own projects.

The step from scraping through simple HTML to using libraries and APIs was too much in my opinion.

By Mr. A B

Feb 9, 2019

I would give 0 stars if I could

By Samuel M

Apr 26, 2022

Overall I really enjoyed the course and I hope to continue with the other two modules in the specialization. I would like to suggest to Dr. Severance that he try Visual Studio Code for the code editor used in the course. The IDE has plugins for a very large selection of languages including Python, but also includes Terminal which is used in place of Command Prompt. This saves always having to restart another program which some students might find really inconvenient, and is much easier to see than Command Prompt. I have a good bit of experience with an older version of Visual Studio programming in C++ and the features in the newest version of Python makes some things in C++ seem quite tedious. I suspect that some of these features may have been added in newer versions of Visual Studio, but that is just conjecture. Thank you for the opportunity to learn Python and I look forward to continuing in Data Sciences courses, especially an Astronomy course managing large data sets.

By Rory P

Sep 23, 2016

Professor Severance is awesome. I really like how each video is an in-depth look at a specific example and that he tells you what to ignore and when. I think his sense of what's important is spot on as I've already started to apply some of his lessons to personal work and find that as I work through personal projects, the next question I have is usually covered in the next lecture or soon thereafter. The videos build on one another in a very coherent manner and the assignments are applicable to what you learned. I think the assignments could be a little more challenging and that more references to the book should be included in the lectures as the book is also very helpful and a great primer for each week's material, especially when it comes to understanding parsing XML and JSON more. I think more chapters on this in the book could be very helpful though.

By Sarvesh M

Nov 26, 2020

This is the third course of Python for Everybody specialization. I love this specialization and I hope whoever took this specialization is greatly benefited by this specialization. I started with the first course which laid the foundation of my python journey. That first lecture in which we learnt the hardware of computers got me a lot more interested in computers and technology. I have to thank UMICH and Coursera for all these courses and I have to thank the instructor, Dr. Chuck for this wonderful specialization. I look forward to meet you in the next course of this specialization which is Using Databases with Python. Thanks a lot and I would encourage anyone who is planning to learn python programming to enroll in this specialization and complete it. This is just awesome if you want to learn python programming. Thansks a lot.

By Ed H C

Nov 1, 2020

Thank You Lord for the strength!!!

Thank You for the support of my family for not bothering me during days and days of solving these assignments.

Thank you DOST Caraga for the the learning opportunity.

Thank you for the loads and loads of coffee.

#HardLife!

By Jocelyne L

Apr 25, 2022

Veyr interessing course. I am not an expert in the subjet, but I am now able to write a program to scrap, parse URLs. I will do more exercices to improve myself.

XML , json, API are no more strange words for me. I recommand this course !

By Shounak P

May 8, 2022

Very versatilte and touched a wide range of relevant topics in the course. Helps in securing a good grasp of the nuances of data parsing from the web. Thank you Dr Chuck and Coursera for this opportunity.

By Monirul H

Apr 12, 2020

It's not that easy like previous two courses. But I'm glad that I had a little bit idea about regular expressions, networking, xml and REST before starting this course.

By Ashwin L

Feb 20, 2021

The course gives good start to python programming. Wanted little extra knowledge on the data structures in python but that maybe a story in some other python course.

By Rana G

May 10, 2022

I have learnt many new things. Assignments are really helpful in implementing the concepts learnt and recalling the things learnt in previous courses.