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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....
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(256 Reviews)

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(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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126 - 150 of 7,919 Reviews for Using Python to Access Web Data

By Gabriela D

Nov 2, 2020

As in the previous courses, the material was well explained and easy to follow. Dr. Severance is charismatic and makes the best of a less-than-ideal medium.

The assignments ended up being quite fun, but the wording is not always 100% clear, which I imagine poses some problems for those whose English isn't great.

The other thing is that the assignments were always more complicated than the examples shown. In some cases, it was possible to apply what we learned; in others, it was necessary to look up how to do certain things. That's not a problem, but expectations should be more clearly communicated because people will waste hours trying to modify code they were shown only to discover that there is a very specific way of writing something. It's akin to showing someone a few collocations in a foreign language and expecting them to intuitively know an idiom they've never seen before. However, for people who are barely learning how to code, assembling and adapting code is perfectly fine, as long as you understand exactly what everything does.

By MUDASSIR I

Aug 13, 2023

5-Star Review for "Using Python to Access Web Data" Course! 🌟

I recently completed the "Using Python to Access Web Data" course, and I am thrilled with the knowledge and skills I've gained! 🚀🌐

This course takes you on an exciting journey through the world of web scraping, APIs, and data formats like JSON, XML, and HTML. The hands-on approach, comprehensive content, and engaging exercises allowed me to truly grasp the concepts and apply them in real-world scenarios. 📊💡

The instructors' expertise and clear explanations made complex topics accessible, and the interactive learning environment kept me engaged and motivated. 🙌🔗

Whether you're a data enthusiast, developer, or someone eager to unlock the power of web data, this course is an invaluable resource. I am now equipped with practical skills that I can immediately apply to projects and challenges. 🌍🔍

I wholeheartedly recommend the "Using Python to Access Web Data" course to anyone looking to enhance their data skills and embark on a data-driven journey with Python! 🎓🐍

By Vikas V

Jun 1, 2019

This has been an excellant designed course for everyone who is interested to become part of python programming course.

Dr. Chuck has been an expectional trainer throught out the course material and his method of explainning the slides while parallely informing that this particular content would help you resolve the 'Grade Exrecise' later down the course is simply awesome.

Once you finish the course,you would definately be in a position to understand from simple to medium complexity python programs.I would like to add one smart trick here "speciality of the course and explanation is the number of times you browse through the video material,more you will increase your understanding for that particular topic.

I can't thanks coursera and Dr. chuck enough to help people learning python so effectively and efficiently and making us build python community.

By German H

Jul 9, 2019

I began learning Python with this course. With absolutely no prior knowledge of or experience in Python (except lots of curiosity), I came across the first two courses on Coursera.org and loved Dr Charles' videos. It's a well structured course, especially if you have just started learning about Python and wish to build your skills more practically than by mere reading of numerous resources. There are plenty of resources that Dr Chuck (as he is fondly referred to by his students) offers in the duration of the course. I especially enjoy the bonus videos that accompany this course. They really help increase your knowledge base and urge you to know and be better and try your hand at various things. I'm glad I decided to pursue the entire specialization offered by University of Michigan, and it is all thanks to Dr. Chuck!

By Aynur Z

Jan 3, 2018

This is a wonderful course and a great tool to learn Python along with some obtaining some fundamental information about the Internet.The video lectures are very clear and accompanied by slides which elaborate the discussed topics. The course also presents a lot of bonus material including interviews. I love the lecturer who gives excellent explanations. My favourite moment was when after explaining the topic about the structure of the internet by a chart Dr. Charles Severance paused for a moment and breathed out heavily and said: "Actually it is easier (the topic) than it sounds". But, of course, his explanations were perfect, he is just passionate about transmitting the information to the students in the easiest to understand manner.And I have to say he succeeds admirably.Overall, I highly recommend this course

By Omar M A

Jul 28, 2020

The course was rich and I learned so many things about web scraping, some regular expressions,parsing html, accessing web data and extracting information from the web, how data is exchanged between different softwares across the web and how to manipulate and parse this data if it was xml or JSON, and a brief introduction to service oriented architecture and what's an API and how to use APIs in your application to add a certain feature.

As always, Dr-Chuck is a great and an engaging instructor and I enjoy his lectures so much!

The only thing that I wished was more clear when I began this course is the exact curriculum and the exact skills that the learner should have by the end of it. I had to do a lot of researching and to thoroughly study the text book to achieve that. Other than that everything was 10/10!

By Anna R

Feb 12, 2019

This course is a good introduction to various aspects of web data. It's a pretty broad overview, so no one topic gets too much focus, but I feel much more informed about working with data from various web sources—how you get it, how it's formatted, and how to work with it once you've retrieved it. Dr. Chuck is a great teacher, and the assignments help you understand the material covered in the lectures through some hands-on work. One downside to this course as compared to the previous courses in the series is that the assignments seemed to involve more direct copying of example code, and less problem solving, which means it was harder to feel that I'd really mastered the techniques. That said, the materials provided are good examples and I'm sure I'll return to them in the future.

By Kip V

Mar 3, 2020

The comments from other students about this being maddening and difficult are fair. There's a lot of arcane stuff in the commands needed to simply set up a connection and there are several places where it's not always clear how to get some code running (eg, twurl, oauth). Two responses that still make the five star rating make sense: 1) the forum was actually pretty helpful in getting through some of the problems; and 2) learning how to solve problems by poking around and experimenting is part of what we need to learn. Finally, I think the whole thing of how do you address individual elements of something returned - JSON or XML - should be a bit of a struggle. Forced me to think, work through things on paper, and I've learned some debugging techniques.

By zhe h

Aug 11, 2016

First, thank you Dr. Chuck for the well-designed class.

Here are a few things that may help improve this class:

first, it might make more sense if you introduce python class or object first, then the package and method and return type will make more sense.

second, it could include more coding for scraping on the web, the examples are very limited(well, ok I understand this is a pretty introductory course....)

Last, for those who use python3, there are many thinks you should notice to make ur code work, such as from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, also notice the urllib has been split so you should import urllib.request and urllib.parse, also for those return value as byte, use decode('utf8') to convert it to strings, otherwise it will cause a lot of trouble in json

By Antonio A L

Dec 18, 2020

I really like the way Dr. Chuck explains the modules. So far, this is the best programming course I've had (certainly I haven't had many of them) and in few weeks I've learned a lot of stuff in short time thanks to the dosage of the course and Dr. Chuck.

On the other hand, I feel week 5 and 6 were a little bit saturated. Not a big concern.

I've read some of other's reviews and I can't explain why this third part of the specialization was too difficult. I never needed any forum's consultancies and I'm 20 years old and this is my first programming course in my entire life. I do believe that Dr. Chuck maybe wanted to grab so much, but is really easy to figure out the assignments with the book, the videos, the python codes that he gave us and so on.

By Ashray G

Jul 18, 2019

As I mentioned in the previous reviews about this Specialisation, all these courses are meant for beginners without previous programming experience and the difficulty of courses rises gradually.Thus, the first course was a real piece of cake, second got a little tougher and this one is the first course that really took me some time to finish it. This time I really had to listen to some lectures twice, to debug my code a hell lot of times and to stick to the sample code a lot.Students, who have programming experience might still think that this course is too slow and easy, but it is a great way for the beginner to learn python.To sum up: great course, uprising difficulties, recommend enrolling after finishing previous courses. 10/10

By Kry

Sep 24, 2016

People use Python for many purposes: to make games, build web services, to solve business problems, to work with sensors, drivers and robots. Python is also used heavily in scientific fields for academic research and applied work.

Python is an incredibly efficient language: your programs will do more in fewer lines of code than many other languages would require.

Py4inf and Python explained by C. Servance, is a great developing of the foundations in programming (first two courses) that will serve you well for the rest of your life, as well as a course that will give you a sort of try to understanding of what great things python can do for you.

I strongly recommend this course for anybody, who wants to start with informatics.

By Pritika S

Sep 7, 2023

The "Using Python to Access Web Data" course on Coursera is an absolute gem for anyone looking to delve into web scraping and data retrieval with Python. Dr. Charles Severance, the instructor, does an outstanding job of breaking down complex concepts into digestible, practical lessons. The course offers a comprehensive introduction to web scraping, utilizing libraries like BeautifulSoup and urllib, making it accessible to beginners while also providing valuable insights for more experienced programmers. The hands-on assignments and quizzes are incredibly beneficial in reinforcing the learning. Overall, this course is a must for anyone interested in harnessing the power of Python for web data manipulation. Highly recommended!

By jorge g

Jul 18, 2017

This is an excellent course. Its level, its intensity, and the assignments are appropriate for people who knew nothing about programming and whose knowledge derives from the courses in this specialization. For students with this background, the time taken to read the material, watch the videos, and prepare the assignments exceeds that advertised in the course, especially the time to complete the assignments. To complete the assignment one needs to master the material and that takes time, more than to understand it, which is easy to do. The information on time spent should be corrected. I have learned much in the three courses taken so far, and expect to continue learning in the remaining two courses in the specialization.

By Frocies J P

Jan 27, 2023

Great course(s). Great instructor(s). Thank you so much guys for having us here taking this awesome online class "Using Python to Access Web Data", with this I've learned a lot with course, from a newbie and now turned into a starter. I would also like to extend my thanks to Dr. Chuck and the rest of the faculty and staff for making this helpful and awesome free courses, this was been a big help to me/us to gain new skills and continue to learn new things and got a bunch of great and awesome stuffs like this one offered from the MU. I loved it and it's been an honored for being one of the students having this course and finished this great opportunity and learning path via online. Big time for me and so thankful!.

By Benjamin S

May 18, 2020

While Course 3 is significantly more challenging and technical than Courses 1 and 2 from the Python specialization, I found this to be the first time I truly felt that my Python knowledge was practically applied. Although parsing local text files is fine, one of my main goals with Python was learning to use it to interface with APIs in a seamless manner. I was also very curious as to how web scraping is actually performed, and I'm proud to say that I finally learned how it works. This course is very valuable for anyone who feels everything they've learned in Python up until this point is highly theoretical and indispensable for anyone looking to apply their Python knowledge in a professional environment.

By Anshul S

Oct 8, 2023

The "Using Python to Access Web Data" course on Coursera is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to harness the power of Python in web-related tasks. Dr. Chuck's clear and engaging teaching style demystifies web scraping, API interactions, and data retrieval, making complex concepts accessible to all. The hands-on assignments and peer-graded projects provide practical experience, reinforcing learning. This course equips learners with essential skills for data collection and manipulation, crucial in today's data-driven world. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced programmer, this course offers a comprehensive and enjoyable journey into web data access using Python. Highly recommended!

By Jeyadarshini S

Jun 16, 2022

It was a good introductory course for web applications using Python and I consider the coding assignments to be pretty challenging. It was hard to learn to be honest, consider how short the explanations are. As the XML, JSON and API concepts are not deeply detailed, the beginners can find it really overwhelming. Its because lots of background knowledge is necessary to get the best of this course. I would prefer it to be longer but still, I'm highly motivated to learn more about APIs in the forth coming days. This course has helped me to put extra effort in my studying journey. I highly recommend people to check out this course to get a hook on how web data can be accessed using Python.

By Mohamed R E

May 25, 2023

Using Python to Access Web Data is a very good course for everyone who wants to continue his learning journey with python. After completing this course, I gained a strong understanding on how to use python to acces web data and the essential concepts of web like protocols,html,xml,json,APIs.., it was very helpful for me and i enjoyed my learning journey a lot especially with Dr.Chuck who was clear, straight to the point, and funny sometimes so that i couldn't feel boredom. I'd like to thank Coursera, Dr Chuck, University of Michigan for this incredible course which made me highly motivated to continue my learning and take the remaining 2 courses of the specialization, Big Thanks.

By Art P

May 11, 2020

The quality of this Coursera specialization continues. Lots of great information about networks and how to interact with them. My interest is definitely piqued for Dr. Chuck's book, "Introduction to Networking" and course "Internet History, Technology, and Security". The programming assignments continue to be straight forward and rewarding. As others have mentioned, the content can be a bit more challenging and technical with slightly less focus on Python than the previous py4e courses. However, the information provides great understanding on how to interact with the internet through Python which is a very common application. It's worth it if you're up for the challenge!

By Barrie C

Apr 12, 2019

Dr. Chuck again does not disappoint. This class gets into the nitty gritty of web scraping using html, xml, JSON and APIs such as Google geo and Twitter. A lot of the framework is given to you in the sample code, but the trick is modifying the code for the specific task they give you, so reading the book chapter and paying close attention in the lectures to how each format is structured will help you. Also use the forum if you need to--if you have already programmed before and sailed through the first two classes in the specialization, this class may surprise you with its increased rigor but once again Dr. Chuck and his staff on the forum will get you up to speed.

By Xavier Y

May 23, 2018

Excellent course, I highly recommend it. Ch. Severance is an excellent instructor, I must have said it already twice, but I can still say it again!

This course didn't make me an expert in accessing Web data, but tought me basic knowledge of what Web Services are and how to work with them in Python. Before, I have heard a bit about these concepts, but I was reluctant to using them because I didn't understand what they actually were. Now, I'm way more confident about this, and I know I'd happily delve into more advanced tutorials or courses on this topic if I needed to. This is the best profit I made from this course. Thanks a lot Dr. Chuck, see you in a next course!

By Luis W D M

Aug 29, 2019

As the two first courses in the "Python for Everyone Specialization", this course is great. I had never done any programming in retrieving data from the web before and it was really fun being capable of learning and doing it.

However, since the lecture videos exploit a lot of the API set ups for Google and Twitter services, I expected assignments would demand these kind of things. On the other hand, as it is a begginer's course, I thought extremely useful as my first contact in retrieving data in different formats (html, xml, json) and in understanding what an API is.

Once again, thanks for Professor Severance and all the staff supporting this specialization!

By Mir A

Nov 15, 2016

I have got a very handsome introduction to the regular expressions , web services and API . The lectures are very easy to follow. It is better to answer the quizzes right after watching the vdo lectures. The questions are mostly from what has been described in the lecture. The assignments are a little more insightful. May require basic google searches to acquire knowledge of accessing the data structures. The assignments addresses rudimentary practical problems but very substantial for starters in this field of programming. Thanks to Dr Chuck. The course is very well organized and have materials to hold the attention of the person who is following the lectures.

By Yashodeep P

Jan 5, 2020

This course is a really good head start to know more about the web and how to parse data from the web.Dr. Chuck explained all the details very well and the assignments are comprehensive. In the initial weeks, the assignments are simple and not so complicated, but as the course advances, you will spend hours to figure out the assignment. At times this is often frustrating but once you get the final answer correct, the accomplishment makes you very happy.I really loved the course and would be looking for other material online to get a deeper knowledge on this subject. Apart from that, I will definitely enroll in all other courses under this specialization.