Chevron Left
Back to Introduction to Data Science in Python

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Data Science in Python by University of Michigan

4.5
stars
26,897 ratings

About the Course

This course will introduce the learner to the basics of the python programming environment, including fundamental python programming techniques such as lambdas, reading and manipulating csv files, and the numpy library. The course will introduce data manipulation and cleaning techniques using the popular python pandas data science library and introduce the abstraction of the Series and DataFrame as the central data structures for data analysis, along with tutorials on how to use functions such as groupby, merge, and pivot tables effectively. By the end of this course, students will be able to take tabular data, clean it, manipulate it, and run basic inferential statistical analyses. This course should be taken before any of the other Applied Data Science with Python courses: Applied Plotting, Charting & Data Representation in Python, Applied Machine Learning in Python, Applied Text Mining in Python, Applied Social Network Analysis in Python....

Top reviews

YH

Sep 28, 2021

This is the practical course.There is some concepts and assignments like: pandas, data-frame, merge and time. The asg 3 and asg4 are difficult but I think that it's very useful and improve my ability.

PK

May 9, 2020

The course had helped in understanding the concepts of NumPy and pandas. The assignments were so helpful to apply these concepts which provide an in-depth understanding of the Numpy as well as pandans

Filter by:

76 - 100 of 5,915 Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

By Yixuan H

•

Sep 29, 2021

This is the practical course.There is some concepts and assignments like: pandas, data-frame, merge and time. The asg 3 and asg4 are difficult but I think that it's very useful and improve my ability.

By Pragyan

•

Sep 21, 2020

Overall the course is fine. Much of the work is left out to the user, which would be a good thing if the lectures actually spent time discussing a topic. The instructor picks up a topic and shows us one example and is done with it.

I was disappointed with the teaching style. That being said, I did learn a lot in this course. I learnt a lot of stuff, but I wasn't taught much. Some of the topics were really interesting but they are concluded in 5 minutes max.

I really wish the programming walkthrough were more comprehensive and not just "here's how you do this thing, let's move on".

The assignments are challenging, but are poorly worded. Half the time I had to figure out myself what the assignment was asking me to do.

By Mr. Q A

•

Dec 26, 2020

The assignments took too long for me to complete .

By Jonathan J

•

Apr 16, 2019

great course, but the auto grader needs updating

By hfculver

•

Apr 4, 2017

Dreadful course. Instructors saw no value in presenting elements of course that would help learners complete the assignments; rather you are sent off to teach yourself about uncovered techniques needed to complete the assignments. From some of the posts from previous students on GitHub, they resorted to deriving the answer from another means (Excel?) and simply providing the answer as a constant value, in order to receive credit for particular questions. Not exactly sterling knowledge transfer, from instructor to student! This course should be presented as a challenge course to people that have already learned Python Pandas from some other venue. (BTW, Pandas documentation is also dreadful, as of this writing.) This is definitely not the way to learn Python for Data Science if you are a busy professional software engineer. (Wish I had a good recommendation as an alternative.)

The only positive aspect of this course is the challenge to work with defined datasets, to complete specific tasks, during week 3. (This was as much time as I could afford to allocate to this course.)

From a 40+ year software engineer, with doctorate in CS, a part-time instructor at a private university, with a very challenging technology job in a multi-national corporation.

By William B

•

Nov 25, 2020

Was not a fan of this course at all. The first assignment is completely on regex which I understand that it is an important topic, but that's a fairly advanced topic in data science so to have as the first assignment of the first course in this specialization seems a little ridiculous. Not a single question on the assignment was on numpy which we spent the vast majority of the week learning. I did not get much out of the other assignments either. Dr. Brooks is really not the best teacher. Very knowledgeable, but not good at relaying that knowledge to others in a clear manner. If I could go back a month I wouldn't have taken this course.

By Marc B

•

Jan 11, 2019

The assignments are good practice, but the course teaches you nearly nothing. You have to do your own research to figure out how to do them.

There are some very useful Mentors on the forums to help the assignments, and if it were not for them, this course would be unbearably frustrating and useless.

By Michael B

•

Mar 3, 2020

Video lessons go way too fast and don't actually try to teach you anything. If you're already a wiz at using Python to do data analysis, then you could certainly keep up, but then you wouldn't need the course in the first place. Very poorly paced.

By Walter G

•

Nov 18, 2020

This is not an introductory course! There is a very large assumption that you already know a lot of about the pandas library, as well as extensive knowledge about dataframes and series.

By Saeed V

•

Sep 19, 2020

This course is a real waste of time! Please avoid!!

The lecturer in general teaches nothing. He explains some basic concepts. You can learn them in a 5 minutes YouTube video. Then, you should answer the detailed/technical coding assignments. The assignments have nothing to deal with the lectures. The lectures have zero to very limited coding explanation. Then, there is an outdated picky auto grader that grades your work. You will spend hours finding out that your code is correct, but the auto grader works with libraries very old versions. I learned nothing from the lectures but I passed the assignments with 90, thanks to StackOverflow and online resources.

I am wondering who gives this course 5 stars. Fake reviews?

By Deleted A

•

Nov 19, 2016

The jupyter notebook made this a horrid experience. Plus Coursera really doesn't want you to bother them with your silly questions, relying on peer-forums. If you scroll through the week's discussion forums, many student posts go ignored.

You can't drop the course past the second (I guess) week so the system will keep on keeping on long after you've given up on trying to figure out the janky notebook thing.

Will not return to Coursera for any reason. Breathtakingly bad experience.

By Deleted A

•

Oct 4, 2020

The course lectures hardly covered what was asked in the assignment. For someone who has a full-time job scouting through discussion forums is extremely time consuming.

By Girija S

•

Nov 2, 2020

Too much content condensed into 4 weeks of course. The videos are very fast with ~1.5 hrs every week and do not cover what is being asked in the assignments at all.

By Patrick H M

•

Nov 12, 2020

Slamming down some notebooks is not teaching. Despite this shortcut does the lecturer still miss to show and explain the difficult cases of the different concepts.

By rodania

•

May 8, 2017

One of the worst course I ever take in coursera. The instructor just writes codes on front of us without explanation.

By amin s

•

Dec 4, 2019

terrible course please improve teaching efficiency and give a proper realistic assignments

By Jeffrey D R

•

May 7, 2018

Like many others, I give this course a high rating while lodging a minor complaint that there wasn't much instruction provided. The lectures were excellent, if brief; it's hard to imagine anyone having objections to the instructor. But in terms of teaching the material, it was a bit of a drive-by. The lectures show a few examples, while not explaining the syntax or the various parameters. You have to draw that out of web sites and cheat sheets. If you're not adept at doing that, proceed with caution here. In the end, I was worn out from the effort, but felt that I had gained a lot.

The assignments were challenging for me because this was my first hands-on experience with Python, much less with Pandas. I did not find Stack Overflow as helpful as the instructor suggested. Nor did I find much help in the forums, but that's not quite my style.

My bottom line is that the course was time well-spent, but it could easily have been a six-week course with a more deliberate pace through the various pandas mechanisms such as merging and grouping.

FWIW: My recommendation is to get to know Jupyter Notebook early and follow along with the lectures by opening the Week[x] files in the course download folder. You can pause the lecture while you go play with the code to make sure you understand it. Also, I recommend working with a local version of Jupyter and keep your files local. Otherwise, Jupyter loses connection to the kernel, and stops being able to save your work. The messages are disconcerting, and if you've worked yourself into a frenzy, they can cause panic and confusion. So do all the work on your machine and then upload the whole assignment when you are finished. You upload on the "Create a Submission" screen; it takes only a sec. You won't even have to worry about details like file paths; they'll be the same either way. Once you get the hang of Jupyter, you can settle into a work routine. Learn some of the keyboard shortcuts.

By Carlos L

•

Oct 26, 2020

Excellent course. I learned a lot about Phyton, even I thought I already knew what Phyton was, but here Phyton is used intensively.

The tests were really tough. I spent hours trying to figure out how to pass the tests. Also, there is a lot of help in the forums, and a lot of people willing to help.

By Adrián A R V

•

Dec 31, 2016

To be an introductory course I struggled a lot, is a very practical course, and the assignements encourage you to learn more. This is the best technical course I have taken. Lo recomiendo ampliamente

By Andrew

•

Feb 11, 2019

Not nearly enough reference content in lectures. It needs to be made clear students coming from the Python for Everybody course (other Umich course) has a book which I was used to referencing for all of my questions (the class was pretty well self contained and did not require much looking up of concepts). I tried to learn this class the same way I did for the previous one and that totally did not work - I spent wayyyy too much time on my first pandas assignment thinking all of the answers were in lecture/notes. The lecture and notes were very very scant and not well explanative about data structures that are very complicated. Please either write a book or make it more clear how students should learn. Yes, the teacher tells us about stackover flow but I didn't know he was implying for us to use those resources. He should say something like "we don't offer a book with this course so use online resources" and not tip toe around the topic because people paid money to learn so take responsibility and make these changes please. I passed but it was very frustrating at first.

By Kelam G

•

Jan 17, 2019

It was informative but i felt the assignment part needed more clarification. I faced the problem that even though my solutions were right the autograder gave me lesser marks. I figured out that we must not print to the console. If that was clearly mentioned life would be easier.

By Trish P

•

Apr 29, 2019

Solid course. I definitely would not recommend it to someone who doesn't have advanced beginner to intermediate python knowledge, though - while it does a good job at a review level for the necessary python, it really moves through the code details quite quickly.

By David R Y R

•

Nov 2, 2020

The course is very task oriented so most of the learning comes from the assignments solution, not from the lectures. Succeeding in the course demands a lot of time for the assignments and quite often you would need to google " pandas how to...". If you want a self-contained course, this is not a good option. However if you want a realistic approach to data science, it may be a good choice.

By Marcel K

•

Apr 19, 2019

It would be nice if Coursera could update the Python environment used for the exercises and assignments to something recent. The version they're using (0.19) is fairly old. Every single assignment that I had running against 0.24 had to be altered in some way to work for 0.19.

By Manuel S

•

Jul 21, 2023

Course is very good but the Assesments are VERY time consuming. You have to cleanup the data by your own (e.g. rename football teams by hand, what is really painfull for someone comming not from USA)