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

4.8
stars
43,891 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....
Highlights
High quality content

(256 Reviews)

Practical assignments

(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.

AB

Jun 6, 2019

Getting a bit more challenging than the earlier courses in the specialization. The exercises require more struggle, but all the information is there. Another step along the way. Thank you, Dr. Chuck!

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226 - 250 of 7,919 Reviews for Using Python to Access Web Data

By Shiva B

Nov 13, 2015

I was sitting behind a proxy server while taking the whole course, I had to get connected to other network without proxy to perform many assignment... It took me some time to realize that urllib can handle proxy server simple by setting an environmental variable. It would be better if Dr. Chuck can give a gist on how to get past proxy in upcoming sessions.

Wrote a crawler and quite often it gets locked up in some kind of error.

By Andreas G

May 27, 2020

Well explained course offering a very good intro into using python to access web data. It does not replace researching a lot on the internet to fill in a number of gaps, but I believe that is to be expected. It is important to learn to read documentation in order to progress. Therefore, it is better if not everything is bite-size. The concepts have been explained rather well and it certainly increased my desire to learn more.

By Aswanikumar D

Dec 9, 2018

This course will be completely helpful to the people who are learning web-development with Python .This will not be specific to Django or Flask framework .The target is to read the data from the API calls through Xml and Json data . ALso it will tell you the basic URL Encoding and decoding to send the data over the server . Regualr expressoins are universal and this course will help you to teach how to implement it in python.

By Dylan K

Nov 24, 2015

Phenomenal. My second completed course with Dr. Chuck as of now, and I cannot wait for the Databases course. This man is not only passionate, but knowledgeable and energetic as well. His courses are the perfect amount of content, and the presentations are always thorough and applied.

Can't say enough good things about the instructor and the course in general. Python newbie to intermediate user thanks to Dr. Chuck -- I love it.

By Abhishek S

Oct 21, 2017

There is one thing I believe is missing in some parts. Like Dr. Chuck provide extra material about how networking works. If its possible, may provide material related to REST and APIs and especially about web scraping. Apart from it, everything is great. Real enjoyed the course. Got to learn lot and lots of things about web and finally know the prestige behind the working of internet. All thanks to Dr. Chuck. Thanks a lot.

By Clint C

May 19, 2019

well scripted course. i think the instructor makes the journey of learning alot more fun than intimidating. id suggest a smoother introduction of API's and use of JSON, a more introductory explanation to the code used (instead of just letting us use it). might be that the code written for the API calling is too advanced for this class? but just stepping through the code a bit slower can help us. thanks for a great course

By Alexis b

May 19, 2017

Thanks for this course Dr-Chuck and thanks to Coursera. It was easily comprehensible and constructed for a fast learning. Your clear voice and sentences made it really pleasant for a fluid and fast learning process. Assignments are also well designed so that one can successfully complete it with few effort and understand it fully at the same time. Finished it in 2 days, hope to find others interesting topics from yours !

By Jacob E

Dec 24, 2019

I took the whole specialization which I strongly recommend over individual pieces. These courses go through a book provided by Charles Severance. He includes all the material and TONS of code he made. Charles goes through all the code he brings up in the class and explains each piece. There are fluff pieces throughout that are not necessary to pass but offer some history. Overall a great course with a great instructor.

By Vince D

Mar 1, 2018

Pretty good, did learn about Json, XML, how it all works together and the coding was challenging but made you think which is good. I liked the course, the instructors were very helpful and responded quickly. Only thing I wish is for the instructions to be a little more clear at the end because they're lengthy.

Other than that I really enjoyed this course and the professor is really knowledgeable!

Videos are quick too!

By Muhammad U K

Aug 31, 2023

First of all the instructor is great and his way of teaching is awesome. None of the lectures is boring and everything was so well explained.

The greatest thing about this course is that in this course the language is taught in such a simple way that even a person that has never used a computer can understand it the logic behind everything. Although you need to learn and practicing coding to perform what you learn.

By Earl N

Feb 19, 2021

This is an awesome starter course for Python. It teaches how to parse xml, html and json. It teaches loops and recursive programs using functions. This course is encouraging and keeps you going. Dr. Chuck is a great speaker and teacher. The interviews with the founding fathers of todays programming languages and the internet as a joy to watch. The office hous videos make you feel like your a member of team.

By Paul R

Jan 23, 2016

Dr. Chuck's lectures are helpful and engaging. Without them I doubt I would be completing the lessons. My goal is to learn Python specifically to apply toward improving how we develop medicines for the pharmaceutical industry. I began taking Dr. Chuck's UM Coursera course after trying out codeacademy and preferred using my own version of Python and IDE rather than the web based compiler provided by codeacademy.

By Oscar A

Mar 30, 2020

The subject is quite massive and complex to get the grasp in a single course.

In any case, Dr. Chuck methodology is quite marvelous, and keeps us engaged to keep learning, and assuring we don't go off track.

I believe this course provides a good coverage of the subject. From here it's important to read the reference materials, and probably take yet another course to get some other examples.

Loved the content!

By Shamir T S

Aug 22, 2019

This course it great! I learned so much about accessing APIs and using XML and JSON in python. I even learned a lot about JSON itself, since it was new to me. Everything is clear and explained. Also everything in this course uses the previous two course as building blocks. Those having a lot of trouble with course may need to review the previous two to be sure that they really grasp what was taught there first.

By Aria B

Dec 27, 2018

This course is awesome! It shows how to scrape data from the internet in a very easy to learn fashion. There are about 10%~20% of the material that is repetitive between videos/weeks, but generally it is very to the point. One awesome thing about it is that after you get familiar with the underlying material of each week, you learn about a "shortcut" that simplifies all the previous steps. Highly recommended.

By Wade W I

Mar 12, 2016

This is the second Coursera course that I have completed; although, I have enrolled in many. Dr. Chuck is one of the best MOOC professors that I have every encountered by far. This course and the quizzes/projects were challenging, but not intimidating. Typically, I have found a disconnect between the lectures/reference material and the quizzes/projects; however, Dr. Chuck has struck the perfect balance.

By Kunal B A

Apr 30, 2020

Its my third course in this specialization. Its very nice course to get started with networking. We get pretty well knowledge of different methods to access web contents. Overall, a very nice course. I enjoyed solving the assignments. We need to do some brainstorming to solve the assignments. really enjoyed it. Thanks to the instructor Mr. Charles Russell Severance for creating such a great course series.

By Michael M

Feb 9, 2016

I liked this course very much! I love Python and now I use it almost every day! There is only one thing that costed me a little more time than others to get used to. I learned Python3 by myself because I was told that Python3 would be more popular. In this course I have had to pay extra attention to the grammar.

Life is short, you need Python. Thank you Chuck! It has been great to learn Python with you!

By Jarek W

Jul 13, 2019

Hello

two issue first, in one of assignment i tried to use request lib but it forced me to use urllib only that a little pity, and in last assignment description of it do not mention that user need to use api_key you can only find out that by reading sample code its this information should be included in description for ppl who want to just write code from 0.

But submitting the whole course was great.

By Leon C

Mar 1, 2018

The intro to network pdf provided by Dr. Chuck was very helpful. It touches on the overview of how the how internet works yet without going through paiful details of physics, mathematics, and engineering. The assignments and quizzes tests your knowledge on some of the important and underlaying details of python programming language that would definitely help me as a programmer and in computer science

By Suman G

Mar 12, 2016

It was an experience for me for a lifetime ! I always dreaded about XML and JSON but this course to an extent removed the fear of XML & JSON of mine. I have to practice a lot in coming days to master XML & JSON and at the same time the Python module "BeautifulSoup".

The course was just gorgeous and our instructor for this course is just great. This is the 3rd course on Python I completed successfully.

By Gaurav B

Mar 23, 2018

Pros

I think this is a great course and the pace is fantastic. Love the insight provided by Dr. Chuck on the practical applications and also the sample code so we can reference it when stuck. He also has a playful way of teaching that makes it fun.

Cons

The peer review method though was a little bit frustrating but it is crowd-sourcing and saves effort from a single resource checking all submissions.

By Pavel M

Nov 22, 2015

I found this course very useful and learnt how use of regular expressions and later used them to parse HTML pages to look at various tags and content. The use of urllib and BeautifulSoup make my life easier to scrape webpages. Finally, I learnt how to parse XML and JSON.

Again, Thank you Dr Chuck and your team for creating such an interesting and exiting course. I have thoroughly enjoyed this.

By Sara L

May 21, 2022

I could really see my progression from courses 1 & 2 coming to fruition in this course. I learned most through doing the assignments and having to fix my errors. It's such a satisfying feeling to see codes run correctly, and knowing exactly what I need to change/erase in a sample code and what to add/modify to make it run according to the assignment brief. So glad I started this specialisation!

By Cindy S

Oct 20, 2018

This course was an interesting look into how the web applications we use everyday store and share data. I am a beginner in this field with no background to computer science and found this course to be fun and comprehensible. I think this course needs more assignments where we practice what we learned, because there is a lot of content that has not been reintroduced since the lecture. Loved it.