CQ
Reviewed Oct 20, 2022
Covered great Python. data engineering techniques as well as using SQLite and MySQL in VSCode
Summary: This course had some good information on how to write SQL queries and integrate SQL into python code, but does not go into enough detail in most places for it to be a great course. The assumed background knowledge for the learner seemed to change rapidly as well, with week 3 being especially disorienting after the gradual introduction of basic topics in weeks 1 and 2.
The good: Week 2 is a good introduction to SQL and the sqlite3 python library and week 4 is a pretty good introduction to mySQL; together they provide a foundation for using SQL in a variety of coding environments when working with local or network data.
The bad: Week 3 is about web scraping unstructured html, which isn't terribly related to SQL and so seemed quite out of place between the two SQL weeks. The first module focused on htmlparser, which requires an understanding of classes and inheritance to set up properly. The lessons on it breezed quickly past these complicated topics, merely showing the learner what to type rather than explaining anything. For a course that only recommends '<1 year python experience' and spent the entire first week going over basic python data structures, assuming learners know about classes and inheritance seemed an odd choice. The lesson on Scrapy/xpath was better but still lacked a lot of details on how these libraries work and why the syntax was the way it was; there was a sense of 'do it just like this and it will work' without much thought to preparing learners to understand and use these tools for any task other than the examples.