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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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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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151 - 175 of 7,919 Reviews for Using Python to Access Web Data

By Malhar B

Jul 1, 2018

Great instructor, great class, and very easy to follow. I learned a LOT!My only critique, is that many times when I am trying to fully understand how some code works within the presentation, the presentation will suddenly show the instructor speaking briefly, and then go back to the code. We don't need to see Steve. When he's trying to explain how code works during the presentation, just show the code. This allows me to understand what's going on while he's still speaking. Otherwise I need to pause the video, and by that point I'm no longer focused on what he was talking about.Otherwise, this course is near perfect, and I've learned a ton from it. Thanks

By Nikita N

Feb 19, 2017

Amazingly excellent course. Many thanks for Dr. Chuck for creating that. Everything explained very well, enabling doing simple steps to quickly achieving results. For those who alreay know some programming I would really recommend starting from this course and skipping the first 2 courses. Skipping means it's better to read the first 10 chapters Dr. Chucks's book through and start this course right after that. It will save your time allowing not ot do too simple tasks but just read about the Python syntax. The course is also great because of Dr. Chuck's talent to explaing everything with fun and ease. Definitely 6 stars out of 5 for the course!

By Kainka

Feb 28, 2017

This is not another general Python course which leaves you with an 'idea' of what can be done and you struggle to actually do it. This course is in fact giving you all the relevant tools you need and leaves you with a set of practical skills allowing you to write Python codes to extract Web Data that can be used for further analysis. Creating a web browser, screen scraping, parsing XML, or JSON are among the actual skills you're getting and this is all possible thanks to the first class lectures and materials provided by Dr. Chuck. He has a particular talent and desire to teach and explain things to you so you will understand them for good.

By Berke E

Sep 20, 2020

I have enjoyed learning about how I can use Python to retrieve information about websites using its JSON and XML data. I had prior knowledge of Python and Data from my data science experience therefore I think that the assignments where pretty easy to complete. I was expecting a bit harder assignments that would challenge me. The quizzes were just enough to test your knowledge about the material. I had to go through my notes before starting a quiz. Now I will challenge myself with the knowledge I have received from this course. Thank you Dr. Chuck , University of Michigan and Coursera for providing Using Python to Access Web Data course.

By Shubhankar S

Jun 11, 2020

I am really grateful to the instructors especially Tamara ma'am. They have never let your morale down and keep boosting your confidence and skills. Whenever I was in trouble, those daily tips for solving the assignment always lead you to your goal closer and closer one at a time instead of giving all the hints at once for helping us understand the contents of the course. And truly I became one of Dr Chuck's fans. I was in awe of his teaching skills and it was good to hear his lectures and explaining hard concepts in a pretty satirical way.Thank you so much and I hope that Dr.Chuck and the teaching staff have seen my appreciation message.

By Jason J

Dec 5, 2017

Dr. Chuck Severance is an excellent teacher. Between his book and the video lectures, I feel 100% comfortable with the material. Granted, this is still a broad overview and we didn't dive too deep (this is a good thing) into REGEX, XML, JSON, along with different libraries (urllib, beautiful soup, etc) but I'm no longer intimidated by the terms and have a great understanding of at least what they are and why there are used. This class is a great foundation upon which one can build with further study. I'm looking forward to finishing the database course and then continuing on the next Python Data Science track offered by UMich.

By Shannon R

Oct 20, 2017

I absolutely loooooooove Charles. His teaching style is so clean and concise, this is clearly his divine purpose in life. The order in which the information is presented is perfect, I feel like I am finally able to make sense of how my computer actually works and does stuff on a daily basis. His passion for this material definitely translates in every lecture, which makes me excited for each new topic. I love the visualizations he includes or draws because it really gives me a grasp of how a program is working as we progress through each component of the program. I wish he taught the data science course too. Thank you Charles!

By Denis B

Oct 26, 2020

Howdy all. I'm not engineer, not programmer. I'm a beginner of programming, so i have small experience of passing courses. But i think, this course needs more assignments in programming to consolidate every theory in our minds, assignments with different levels of difficulty, including assignments with less amount of prompts.

But i think course is useful, don't miss it.

P.S. maybe for some beginners this course very hard, but i think that it isn't easy mostly for many people, when you learning something new in your life. Learning how to find needed information in internet is great useful experience too ;)

By Sayak C

Aug 12, 2020

The last week may turn out to be a bit harder than the rest and people might find it a bit more difficult than the previous courses but the devil is in the details. The are a lot of minute details that demand your attention and require to be learnt, because if you somehow miss these details or overlook the little important things, it'll become far harder to finish the assignments and weekly quizzes. As for me the simple sequence of parameters in an url was the difference between the wrong answer and the right. You'll learn a lot of stuff that requires detailed attention, every part will be requiring a lot of focus.

By Hikmet H

Jan 17, 2021

Great course! Dr. Severance did a fantastic job, similar to what he did on previous modules. Naturally, going through the modules, difficulty level goes up and Dr. Severance is managing this very professionally. It took me less than a week time to complete first 3 modules and hopefully planning to complete rest of the modules during the upcoming week. I would rather learn any subject in a fast mode, instead of doing it in slow motion as giving days between, it takes a while to remember what you learned before. This is my personal method, which may not work in other students. Good luck to all the students!

By Huynh L D

Jan 5, 2016

Dr. Chuck is an exceptionally-inspiring teacher. He explains complex concepts like XML, JSON, HTTP, API, RegEx in such an eloquent and down-to-earth fashion that despite having the videos at x2.0 speed, I can grasp everything he tries to deliver. Amazing! This course, and many other Dr. Chuck's courses, are really how online courses should be. Excellent instructor, fair share of hands-on programming assignments.

However, I just hope that there are many more programming assignments, maybe many optional challenging, extensive programming assignments or even projects would be an ultimate Coursera experience.

By Dinesh L

Oct 29, 2020

Interesting course. A few comments. 1: The example codes are helpful. However, I am not sure if I would be able to write a program from scratch using a customer specification. 2. The Twitter example is interesting and complicated. 3. How was the twURL code created? Is this something we will learn in this course? Many thanks to Dr. Chuck for sharing interview videos and great explanation of the material. The video of the lectures are good but I had to view them multiple times to really understand what is going on. Some of the explanations went too fast for me. The text of the video lectures are helpful.

By Mohammad M

Jun 24, 2022

Introduces how to connect to the internet using sockets for our knowledge. Then shows we have a better way of using the urllib in Python. Teaches us how to read data from websites including HTTP and HTTPS. We first use regular expressions to get the data we want, but these are too difficult and we stop using them later, especially with HTML as they are unpredicted. We then switch XML and BeautifulSoup deal with HTML websites. We eventually get to json and how it makes our life much easier, albeit XML can sometimes be required sometimes. Then we go through parsing and looking for certain data on API.

By Sidra F A

May 31, 2018

There are times in this course when you would want to go and hug Dr Chuck for making it so simple and easy to understand few of the most complex concepts in language and specially for people having no prior knowledge of the subject. One gets this feeling quite often "keep going, you can do this, its easy".

Also, this will be my first ever course on coursera that I'll complete and not just leave in the middle because this is how an online course should be - doesn't waste time, has condense information in every minute of the video lectures and stays true to topics without going under/overboard.

By Jenkins P S J

May 22, 2020

The course content is excellent. The way of teaching of the great Dr Chuck is very engaging. This is the third course I have taken under him and surely, he is one of the best teachers I ever had. He breaks down the contents into nice little pieces and presses one those areas which are important. The assignments are a bit challenging compared to the previous two courses and encompasses everything that are thought in the course. The bonus contents are awesome and love watching them after doing the assignments. Overall, as a great learning experience with Dr Chuck as it always will be.

By Syed A A

Dec 31, 2022

This one was GREAT!! All the assignments were demanding, and needed a lot of reviewing the lectures/searching the internet. It felt very usefull as well. I had some experience of requesting data using APIs at the R programming course in my University. However, the api codes were alraedy provided, and we just copy pasted it. Thus, this program expanded my knowledge on it . 10/10 would recommend. If you're looking for "Data Analytics" type skills in python, this might not be what your'e looking for, but these knowledge are extremely handy when doing stuff like Jupyter Notebook etc

By Maksym S

Nov 16, 2015

I'm not exactly new to python, but my typical use-cases looked more like hacking rather then conscious programming.

Said all this, I've found the first block - introduction to Python, to be very basic and slow paced, but starting from the Web it is all good stuff only.

It deserves to become one of the coursera classics. Great combination of pedagogical talent, humor an knowledge of the subject. It also tremendously helps that the course is backed by the book so it is always possible to look back for that "Introduction to Python" part, that I've skipped ;)

By CHAMAL D R

Jun 11, 2023

The course "Using Python to Access Web Data" on Coursera provided a valuable learning experience. It covered essential topics like web scraping, parsing HTML, working with APIs, and handling data formats. The content was well-structured, with clear explanations and practical examples. The hands-on exercises and assignments helped solidify the concepts. The discussion forums and peer-reviewed assignments provided opportunities for interaction and feedback. Overall, I highly recommend this course to anyone interested in using Python for web data access.

By beliefs22

Jan 1, 2016

I've taken a number of courses on Python through Coursera and this was the first course that I was able to follow through to completion, and I believe that is a combination of Dr. Chucks teaching style, and the activities he uses to convey the information. It was amazing to learn about things like using APIs and mixing python with Databases in a way I could understand at my level of programming knowledge, and it enabled me to start thinking about my own projects in a completely new way.

I'm really looking forward to completing the capstone project.

By Michael R

Jun 6, 2016

This course has been a Godsend to me. I was so confused about so many things and all the other resources I could find out there just assumed that I knew things about which I was, in fact, clueless. I got the book and watched a lot of the lectures twice but in the end I really feel like I got it. The assignments were manageable and doable after the course lectures and I have gone back and done a number of them over again to solidify things in my mind. I feel like the web is my friend now, not a source of cheap tricks and booby traps. Thanks!

By Joe W

Jun 15, 2017

While I'm an experienced programmer I'm relatively new to Python and had never done anything with either XML or JSON before this course. Yet here I am understanding it all and successfully doing genuinely useful things with them in Python.

There can't be that many courses that can get a beginner useful in just six sets of lessons. Novice programmers should take this at the recommended pace and do not move on until you have 100% on all assessment items. Experienced programmers should be able to complete this in a couple of days. I did. :)

By Jarosław G

Oct 14, 2018

I am totally new to programming. I have experience working in a technical environment

and have a lot to do with IT in my daily job, but I wanted to learn something new. I made

different attempts to learn to programm, but all of them failed. Now, I have been doing the whole module

of Python for Everybody (5 courses) and I am enjoying it a lot. Lectures by Dr Chuck are really insporational, well prepared and

easy to understand to a person who does not have any experience with programming.

I am becoming more and more involved into python:).

By Juan O L

Jan 20, 2016

I think this course is a really good overview of how to use Python to retrieve web data using the two most common data interchange formats: XML and JSON. Not only that, but you also get a brief yet good introduction to what XML and JSON are, as well as the basics of network communication and regular expressions. I was hoping the assignments would be a bit more challenging, but the free textbook provides additional exercises to practice with. As always, Dr. Chuck's style helps makes this course (and his other ones) a great one.

By Juan D

Jul 8, 2016

I learnt Python with the introductory course "Programming for Everybody". Then, I completed this course and it added a whole lot of tools to my knowledge. It is amazing how much you can accomplish in such a short course. The assignments are very well oriented, so by basically modifying the code you wrote for this class you can already do a lot. It also gives you a very good basic knowledge about web programming, so you can now understand and interpret many things and concepts you are seeing all the time. I recommend it a lot.

By AKANKSHYA N

Jul 21, 2020

This course is like the cheery on the top. It makes you use the web data , you will learn about retrieving the html, xml pages and you can even search for any particular element and also can add up any element from the source page. The best part is in the last week of this course, where it teaches about how you can use APIs of googlemaps, twitter . At the end you will be able to write a program of 30 lines to just take input of any location(even some parts of it) and it will give you back complete info about it. Loving it:)