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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Data Collection and Processing with Python by University of Michigan

4.7
stars
3,870 ratings

About the Course

This course teaches you to fetch and process data from services on the Internet. It covers Python list comprehensions and provides opportunities to practice extracting from and processing deeply nested data. You'll also learn how to use the Python requests module to interact with REST APIs and what to look for in documentation of those APIs. For the final project, you will construct a “tag recommender” for the flickr photo sharing site. The course is well-suited for you if you have already taken the "Python Basics" and "Python Functions, Files, and Dictionaries" courses (courses 1 and 2 of the Python 3 Programming Specialization). If you are already familiar with Python fundamentals but want practice at retrieving and processing complex nested data from Internet services, you can also benefit from this course without taking the previous two. This is the third of five courses in the Python 3 Programming Specialization....

Top reviews

AG

Jul 9, 2020

Very interesting and fine course, in this course I learn how to solve Nested data and new a new thing i.e REST API which seems best in course 3 now I am excited about course 4. Thanking you Michigan

CM

Oct 9, 2019

This was a really excellent course. The functional project at the end helped me understand how recommendation systems work and now I'm very excited to try to build a similar system for books I love.

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26 - 50 of 675 Reviews for Data Collection and Processing with Python

By Camilo G

Nov 14, 2021

Instead of taking advantage of that great tool which is Codelens, this course's last week is almost entiley based on a taylor made module (request_with_cache) which can't be debugged with codelens because it is not included. Further more, this module is as well not working on the interpreter, so basically there isn't any other way to work with it different than trial error.

It is a pitty given that the first 2 weeks of the course are awesome. It is the third one which supposedly contains the added value, the one that is less flexible and not clear.

By Simon S

Jan 11, 2022

This course does have good content, but unfortunately Runestone "ruins" the experience. Especially with the last assessment on week 3. If you are going to take this course READ THE FORUM on the last exercise. Cache data is missing and will lead to buggy output that has nothing to do with your code! And all of these errors are from a long time ago that the course admins won't fix, despite posting updates to Ruin Stone!

By Michael K

Aug 1, 2020

Runestone never seems to work and I can't practice the lessons. Why is this always a problem? Otherwise, I love this course. Also, why isn't there a specific section on how to access Runestone in the Help section. In fact, the Help section seems pretty lean on content.

By Sushant S

May 8, 2020

The final exam was extremely tough to finish, not because it was technically tough but because the apis using notebook was extremely challenging. Authors should use their own apis for data hosted on amazon aws or elsewhere so that data is consistent.

By Maksud B M

May 31, 2020

Very much disappointed with this runestone ide, answers are backdated and doesn't match with my output. Specially ratings which change over time but the answer encrypted in the environment doesn't change. And also the whole thing seems bugged

By harrison b

Jan 24, 2019

Only one instructor helped answering questions. Runestone (software used to practice) had bugs and they were fixed every 10 days or so after the instructor noticed on boards--thats how often he was on.

By Anirudh

Jul 30, 2020

Terrible experience with the final assignment

By Jerrold

Jul 4, 2020

I just took course 3 because I wanted to learn the syllabus in this course to brush up on my Python skills for data analysis. The course material covered the topics listed in the syllabus for this course excellently, I could follow all the lectures, the instructor was decent and slowly but thoroughly explains all the concepts while typing and running the code on his screen. However the runestone environment which is what the assignment and project is done in a while getting used to as it is a broswer programming environment not a local machine program like IDLE.

A damn good course with manageable assignments. I highly urge anyone who wants to go venture into data science/analysis using Python to take it. Thanks University of Michigan!

By Igor F

Jan 27, 2019

This course helped to understand such convinient thing as list comprehension, also it was really nice to work with API even without having API keys thanks to cached API's responses. I think that these parts are very practical, and I will use these things in the future. Though week's 3 theoretical part seemed to me a little bit long, and, probably, you should spend more time in the real Python environment, I still have enjoyed this course. Completion of the final project really gave me the feeling of personal achievement.

I'd like also to note that on the moment of completion of this course I haven't met same techical problems mentioned on the discusion forums by other participants of the course.

By Enam B

Jul 30, 2020

Very good and informative course. Learned a lot compared to the other 2 courses in this specialization. If you are planning to enroll, please after completion, try to remember whatever was taught in this course. I can guarantee, you will be able to code very efficiently.

Hints - I was able to complete the final assignment within 41 lines (including 9 blank lines, so, basically it is 41-9 = 32 lines) without using any special functions. Just used whatever was taught in this course.

I am really grateful to Professor Paul Resnick. And as always, a big fan of his jokes. Great course!!

By Tingting Y

Aug 11, 2020

Many thanks to the University of Michigan for offering this extremely good intermediate-level python course, and thank you Coursera for making it free. I was able to apply what I learned in the two introductory courses in this python specialisation to very practical problems. However, the difficulty of the final project seemed to be too great a leap from that of the preceding chapter exercises. It would be a good idea to incorporate more smaller coding tasks as chapter exercises in this part of the textbook.

By Ayush P

Aug 3, 2020

It's a great course to work on REST API's as we doesn't require any API key for extraction of data.

Mentor has very well explained the content, to how to extract data from JSON formatted dictionaries.

I loved the concept of understand , extract and repeat...

Just a suggestion : the indent argument in json.jumps is not showing the content in indented format . Therefore, it is sometimes difficult to understand the nested data.Please ! Fix that bug.

By Tushar S

May 18, 2020

This was a very efficient course. It helped me to understand the basic concept of how internet works while requesting data from it. Further it taught me how to read and thus use the documentation of a few REST API. The environment is designed in a way that you can practically examine and use how API works, WITHOUT the need of having a key (*for restricted data available in cached file already).

Thank you to all the professors.

Love from INDIA!!!

By Renee

Jul 8, 2021

Continuing on with the Python specialization, this course fits right in. The focus is on the language & logic, and the messiness of actual internet API calls is abstracted away. Students may find it useful to go practice on their own in an IDE to fill in this gap, but for straight up working with data and getting continued practice with list & dictionary processing, this course fits the bill in the larger scope of the specialization.

By Stella B

Jul 29, 2019

This course gives you so much understanding of API and how useful they can be! The exercises and especially the last assessment of week 3 requires to assembling everything you've learned(and sometimes more than that) to solve it. Through the process of trial and error, you'd learn more than you can imagine, not just on APIs but on how assemble multiple complex functions into 1 cohesive program. I strongly recommend to do this course !!

By Kyle K

Aug 6, 2021

Strangely, the first appearance of Dr. Charles Severance in my experience of the Python 3 programming specialization, albeit for a single <20 min segment on the Google geo-API (contrary to what is claimed in each courses intro video: Chuck does not teach each 'Way of the Programmer' segment).

I really learned more than I expected to, a good intro to map/reduce, list comprehension, filtering, and a fairly meaty end of course project.

By Rodrigo S L

Aug 19, 2020

This course is the most difficult in the specialization yet... If you've done course 1 and 2, this one is going to challenge you. However, finishing the course and getting the certificate, will give you great satisfaction. Dr. Resnick has a great talent for explaining things, and the textbook tool is simply one of the best tools to learn programming. Highly recommended.

Also, the dad jokes, LOL.

By Brandon H

Aug 25, 2020

The final project was demanding and rewarding. Required overcoming diverse coding challenges to bring together skills from other courses in the specialization. Really a great experience. The openly available api keys made getting the working version on my local machine possible, which greatly added to the learning experience

The videos, examples and practice material were once again excellent

By Scott K

Dec 13, 2020

Very informative. Great textbook and exercises. The lectures were a bit basic for me, but that's just because they were thorough. I was able to skip them and just use the online textbook and complete assignments to go faster when I wanted. Do yourself a favor and download PyCharm or another code editing program to make it easier to experiment on your own as you work through the assignments.

By PANIDAPU H C

May 25, 2020

I AM VERY HAPPY THAT I HAVE TAKEN THIS SPECIALISATION.I HAD A LOT OF FUN.I ENJOYED A LOT.I GOT MORE AND MORE INFORMATION ABOUT API AND LIST COMPREHENSIONS,DATA COLLECTION AND A LOT OF THINGS.I LIKE LECTURES OF PROFESSOR PAUL.THANK YOU TEAM COURSERA FOR PROVIDING SUCH A BEAUTIFUL COURSE AND IT'S WONDERFUL.THANK YOU TO INSTRUCTORS OF MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY.I WISH TO DO MORE AND MORE COURSES.

By James M

Aug 17, 2020

Excellent course. Challenging but "do-able" project. Professor Resnick gives very clear explanations in the videos.

When you code a request that goes out onto the internet and actually brings back information into your program just the way you told it to -well, there's something close to delight that you feel as 100 lines of info scroll down the screen.

By Collin M

Feb 28, 2021

Very good material on how to iterate through nested data structures and retrieving and organizing data from web url's. The course project was difficult, and I needed to find information from third party websites to complete it. But, it provided hands on experience introducing useful and practical applications of the material included in this course.

By Bret G

Dec 29, 2020

I had an easier time with this project than with the project from Course 2 (Python Functions, Files, and Dictionaries). If you struggled with Course 2's project, don't fret! With that being said, I feel like I learned a lot in this course that can be more directly applied to real-life work, particularly with function-building and API use.

By Suresh C

Jul 29, 2019

It's very thorough class and I enjoyed completing it. I have a suggestion. The API data extraction environment could have been made better. Many times, my script succeeds in Jupyter but fails in Runestone environment. Not sure what the problem is. I noticed several messages in discussion forums with similar observation. Thanks.

By Richard G

Mar 18, 2024

The University of Michigan Python specialization is the best series of Coursera courses that I've taken. The videos are high quality and informative, the Rhinestone online textbook is a great source for practical experience in writing code and the daily practice keeps up your recollection of earlier topics. Highly recommend