Lazy, Sloppy, Unfocused

Lets see

-Video content is minimal. This is not really a video course. I've never experienced this on Coursera before, the 4 videos that do exist aren't useful in any way.

-The is some introductory, and unnecessary, introduction to both cloud computing and ssh / scp commands. I'm not really sure why it's there, when all of the assignments focus on both git and bash. So anything you did learn in these sections (likely nothing) isn't reinforced. It should be bonus material.

-Many things about bash are truly unusual compared to other programming languages like python/r/php/etc. When these differences crop up (such as how bash handles (), {}, [], [[ ]], spaces, AND, ||, functional returns, etc) are still somewhat confusing to me after completing the entire course. So maybe I'm a dummy, but I'm guessing MOST people completing this course will only be slightly better off doing bash programming vs. doing nothing at all.

-Quizzes were often trivially easy. What will a bash command output? Well, I guess you're not *supposed* to just run the command in bash to see the output...

I could go on, but honestly, this is a terrible course. I actually need to use bash at work, having a certificate is nice I guess, but my time may have been better served with trial and error on my actual projects.

Full disclosure: I am a self-trained Linux user, and have been using Linux as my main OS for more than 10 years. The main reason I tried (and eventually purchased) this course was that I needed a certificate to "prove" my knowledge of the terminal for *official* reasons (employment etc) and a Coursera certificate was suggested as a solution. Furthermore, I thought that some of the material seemed interesting and that I may also learn something new.

Overall, the course was acceptable. Most of the material, especially the terminal basics and bash programming segments, was laid out in a comprehensive manner. Although, to be honest, more could have been done in the introductory section (for example, a discussion on root vs non-root access, the purposes of superusers and sudo etc. This is one of the most important parts of Linux).

The Git/GitHub material was especially welcome since, for whatever reason, I had never used it before. This was the most useful part of the course for me.

So, why the 3 stars then, instead of 4 or 5?

The weakest point of this course is the final part, the so called "Nephology" segment that, supposedly, deals with "cloud computing":

I find the fact that the course requires/instructs you to open an account in a commercial Cloud infrastructure (DigitalOcean) and purchase a VM unacceptable (despite what the course says about a free trial, D.Ocean wants to conduct a 25 dollar transaction during registration "for confirmation purposes"). There are a number of respectable Cloud infrastructures out there that actually offer free of charge resources (Red Hat's OpenShift, Google cloud etc) and could have been used instead. Or, since this course is offered by a University, maybe they could have allocated a fraction of their compute resources to set up a small VM server for the purposes of this course.

Even if we gloss over the aforementioned fact, the presentation of the "nephology" course itself was subpar. It was simply a poorly conceived introduction to the ssh protocol and cron jobs. No other relevant protocols were discussed (for example, ftp/sftp - it's not anything advanced, and its the most widely used file transfer protocol) and - more importantly - no discussion was presented on security and how to (you know... the first 's' in 'ssh' and 'sftp').

For example, the fact that they instruct you to create ssh connections as root says it all. Advice to anyone reading this: NEVER, ever, EVER login as root. SSH may have 'secure' in its name, but it's not really that secure. Do it only once, create a normal user account with 'useradd' and give it sudoers credentials with 'visudo', and use that account onwards. NEVER perform ssh connections as root!!!!

So, overall, acceptable course, but the Nephology part needs to either be re-written from scratch and include more - and critically useful - material, or be removed altogether.

Generally mediocre introduction to a few bits and pieces of unix. Useful, but has some misconceptions (e.g., what a regular expression is) and will teach you some unsafe habits (e.g., using $* instead of $@ to expand to the positional parameters starting from 1). It would be nice if there was some discussion about what shell scripts were actually used for out in the world. The cloud computing section seems tacked on and wholly unhelpful. Don't make your students give their credit card numbers to some external business unless you're going to do something of at least some lasting value. Even then, you probably should find another way to do this. Set something up on a coursera or JHU server if all you're going to do is literally have them copy and paste (and not learn) 6 lines of code.

A wonderful course! Answered so many questions I had and gave me a solid background in Git, Bash, makefiles, and working from the cloud. I will definitely be using these skills in my job search!

It is suitable for Unix/Linux beginners who are new to shell. It introduces popular code sharing and merging tool GitHub, which most programmers would find very useful in software development.

Great course if you're getting used to Linux, working in the shell and automating the little things. This course comes with a convenient E-book which I've used to refer back to a few times.

They are Expecting more than whatever taught in the course. In spite of submitting my own assignment work, it has been flagged. After modifying the complete script then again it has been flagged. Don't know what they are expecting. For a beginner, It's very difficult to go with the course as in this course only reading material has been provided no practical demonstration. It's better to purchase a book that will be a good deal upon choosing this course. From one month, I am trying to remove the flagged violation but nothing worked. I love to learn Unix but this course completely disappointed me. I continuously worked for 2 weeks to learn Unix and even tried to write my own scripts but in the last, I got a message that I have copied others assignment. Based on the given guidelines on the Project assignment. It's obvious that some scripts would get matched. As two different peoples may have same logical thinking and for just 15-20 lines of code, there is a great chance of collapsing the scripts. Hope this review will taken in positive way to improve this course.

99% of the contents in this course are transfered from the book of the same title. No instruction videos. The difficulty is somehow low which makes the author's elaboration feels dry and lengthy.

It is almost the same as reading the book yourself, beside the discussion forum, which is also not very helpful in my opinion.

Be careful before enrolling into this course. This is simply a soft copy of a physical BOOK, that's all about it!!!

Full of typos. Videos are empty of useful content. No advantage over just studying a well-written book.

First of all, I should say that I was already quite familiar with the topics taught in this course, but I decided to take it anyways, because I believe in periodical review of my knowledge. I have found the style of the lessons to be very intriguing, easy to follow (but may be different if you are new to the topics) and very on point, with a ton of different, super-important technologies that we are expected to know and manage on a daily basis - and by “we” I mean almost anyone involved in the computational sciences ! This course is a nice recap of a lot of fundamental tools to keep at hand on your “Unix Workbench” ! Thank you, instructors, staff, forum members and peers ! P.S. Sometimes I have found the estimated times a bit misleading: too much for lessons, too little for exercises, but this may completely be a personal thing.

This was an excellent course that challenged me, and helped me to both refresh and advance my programming skills. The Johns Hopkins University has really advanced some of their online courses by designing them to integrate all of the skills learned in each week. At the end of this course, you actually need to bring together the skills learned throughout each and every section. The end project gets the learner to start thinking about how to use each module, and bring them together to accomplish new challenges, thus bridging the gap between theory and application. It allows allows enough room for learners to be creative and experiment with different ways of achieving the same goal - A big thanks to those who created and facilitate the course :)

This is a very friendly step-by-step guide to Unix for beginners, it helps to build a solid foundation, and the exercises are designed to explore more about what has been introduced in the course.

This course is well structured, useful in learning experience, work enverionment experience, and personally who ever start this course are going to really enjoy script programming.

It was a pleasure for me to participate on that valuable course. I would like to highlight the modular, clear explanaitions - which were very usefull whenever was in doubt or clarification was needed; the step-by-step approach and the well designed exercises/practises - which all supported the peviously explained subjects. It was really good to give the freedom to accomplish the goals in no strict schedule - so please keep that flexibility inthe future as well.

I would like to thank you the constructive and helpfull feedbacks for the teachers, which always inspired to re-think or improve my understanding/knowledge.

This course is really helpful! The organization of the course content and the diversity of the topics offered are great. The examples given are illustrative and the book is very organized and simple for new users, yet powerful enough for intermediate level students. I thought that I knew a lot about Unix and that I won't learn much from this course, but I learnt a lot more than expected. The author is really talented in teaching. I'm recommending this course to everyone. Thank toy very much; I enjoyed the whole course especially weeks 3 and 4.

I think this course was really helpful to a beginner like me! It teaches you the basics to get you started with Unix and GitHub and does not take up much of your time every week. However, the deadlines keep you in line with studying and putting some effort! So I think it's perfect for someone who does not have much time and wants a little guidance on their first steps! And a small tip: I took this course Jan-2018 on Windows 10. The Ubuntu Windows app did not work well for me. Setting up a Virtual box Ubuntu was much better!!!

This course was a great intro to bash programming. It started in a very accessible manner, clearly describing the technology in small easily digestible steps. It progresses at a good pace covering the significant paradigms (e.g. functions, loops, arrays) in a staged and clearly defined way. I liked the way it gave a realistic and rounded view of working on unix by covering tools such as make and git that are maybe not directly bash programming language, as such, but essential to become productive with the new bash skills!

Very concise and clear course, giving a good overall idea of the power of Unix & Shell scripting.

The quizzes and exercises were challenging and a great way to learn new things without the help of an instructor, but rather by googling a lot!

I also enjoyed the very last chapters where Sean gives advice about different programming languages to follow with after finishing this course, and particularly his honesty regarding the limitations of Unix & Bash in general.

Well done & thank you for your teachings.

Difficult, but worth it if you have the time, patience, and ability to get through the course. I learned a lot and wished this course was around when I got into front-end development. Not all of it is pertinent for all occupations, so feel free to pick and choose the most relevant lessons. I was curious about the topics covered outside the scope of my work as a dev and learned a lot and now have a further interest in data science and automation.