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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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176 - 200 of 7,919 Reviews for Using Python to Access Web Data

By Sarfuddin A T

Aug 8, 2020

Dr. Chuck is an expert and an efficient teacher of the course. However for me his lectures were sometimes pretty fast when I had difficulty following him and its very normal in a online course. I faced difficulty mainly in the week 4 and week 5 specially webpage parsing using xmlTree where I took longer time then normal. However Teaching staff from the course patiently provided suggestion for correctly solving the problems.

Thanks are due to both University of Michigan and Courera for arranging Dr. Chucks courses.

By Derek O

Oct 16, 2017

Great course all around, truly feel like I learned a lot! Really appreciate how Dr. Chuck takes concepts and topics that could easily get mixed up or "over-thought" (my bad habit haha) and orders them in a way that flows well and makes sense to the relative rookie like myself. Thanks so much for making someone who used to think he'd never be able to code feel like "Hey I can do this stuff!" It will make a huge difference in my career and my personal confidence. Please keep making great courses! =) - Kind regards, Derek

By Mohd A N

Jul 18, 2020

This is the 3rd course of the Python specialisation that I've completed from Coursera and taught by Dr. Charles Severance. This one was far-most the most teaching centred of all the three, and now I feel I've a good command on python to write my own back to intermediate programme. I even built an Instagram video downloader with the knowledge I gathered from this course.And as always, Dr. Chuck is a really interesting instructor, plus his website is the perfect place you could simulate your learnings.Happy learning!

By Anand B S

Oct 17, 2016

The Teacher made me thirsty of more work. Especially in the last chapter, I was looking for more challenging work. The way the assignment was designed and the topics were taught made me think, the assignment for the last week was quite easier and I was expecting something more challenging. This proves the beauty of this class. I wish I have a trainer like this always with me, at least as long as I cannot go out and look for work myself.

Thanks a million to Dr. Charles Severance. This is a very positive experience.

By Jonpaul W

Mar 2, 2016

Good initial overview to the topic. Most code is actually provided to the student, preventing deeper learning via trial & error. However, it is a tradeoff of making the course accessible to a large number of students versus being too challenging and preventing newcomers from enjoying the subject. Dr. Severance is excellent -- entertaining and clearly very knowledgable. For any novice programmers looking to understand how Python can be used to access the web and scrape its data, this is the best place to start.

By Leonard M

Sep 13, 2018

This is the 3rd course of the "Python for Everybody" specialisation in Coursera.While the first 2 courses were too easy, I found that things started to get more interesting with this one. We learn about Webservices, XML and JSON manipulation and web scraping with Python. The level is still easy but the teacher is engaging and the code examples are well done. With some imagination, one can easily reuse this knowledge and go to the next level.This is a good course to learn the basis of web services with Python.

By Vitalii U

May 27, 2018

Excellent course as the previous Python for Everybody courses I have taken before. It gave good understanding on how programming languages interact with web services. On top of this it gives good introduction to API. Examples and assignments really help not only to get theory, but ho to use the knowledge in practice. In addition this helps better to remember the materials of the course. Great initiative and really good introduction to programming which could help to take more advanced courses in data science.

By Joseph G

May 8, 2017

This is a very good course. My goal from this course was to get knowledge about using python to extract data from websites and apis. I come with a business intelligence background and I found this course very useful and is definitely going to add value in my career. The professor was great and it was a pleasure to watch his videos and hear his knowledge. I will recommend this course to anyone who is interested in making use of a beautiful language (-Python) to extract data from the internet. FIVE STAR

By Edward F

May 31, 2017

I took the Python Specialization, which included this course, so I'm going to provide the same review for each of the component courses.

I think this is an excellent course for beginning programmers. Python is a great language for someone starting out - easy to learn - with a lot of power available for more advanced projects (e.g., machine learning).

But, most of all, you have to love Dr. Serverance. I can't think of a more entertaining and enjoyable person to teach programming. Thanks, Dr. Chuck.

By Аитор Х

Jul 23, 2018

Wonderful course, the way Chuck explains it is the cherry on the cake that makes all the specialisation even more valuable. The content itself is really useful and a good starting point for projects that require the use of APIs. If something I wish there was a video explaining how to understand the "def augment" that Dr-Chuck did, referring to the "oAuth.py" of the twitter API but overall I'm really happy with all I've learnt and I would definitely recommend this to all curious people out there.

By Alan P

Oct 30, 2015

Awesome.

Truly awesome.

Professor Severance (a.k.a. 'Dr Chuck') is an amazing teacher, explaining the content in a clear yet engaging way - truth is, it gives the impression of being a wonderful human being tout-court. The coding exercises are very well crafted, and show how to use tiny Python snippets to carry out heavy tasks.

So if you've never really sat down to learn regexes, or if you want to have a minimal web crawler/scraper running in less than one hour, this class might be your cup of tea.

By Christopher T

Dec 20, 2017

Dr. Chuck's courses are great!! I am enjoying them immensely. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Chuck in person. He is personable and engaging. Take the chance to meet him if he hosts live office hours near you. These Cousera MOOCs are easy to navigate and provide a wealth of valuable material for people at all levels. The first assignment of week 6 was the hardest yet, but following Dr. Chuck's lectures and with the help of some very wise mentors and tutors the code problems are easily solved.

By Venugopal A

Feb 4, 2016

It was really helpful. I have 18 years of software development experience, but never learnt python and after going through this course, I could understand the power of it and how it can be used. I could learn the concepts very well and of course had to google to refresh myself, but its well organized and put together in a way we can learn easier and faster.

Thanks to Dr Chuck. Sometimes your comedy was above and beyond, but at the end of the day, it was a good course and learned quite a bit.

By Manuel A A T

Jul 20, 2016

Absolutely a MUST for anyone looking for a smooth intro into APIs, HTTP requests, and data exchange on the web. As always, Dr. Charles' magnificent pedagogy will guide you step by step up to the point where you will be sending requests and fetching data from your Twitter account. Create one if yo do not have it yet. :-)

It will be absolutely beneficial to update this course to discuss the Twitter library available in Python, wish is far easier to use than the currently explained method.

By Hui C H J

Mar 18, 2021

I have enjoyed learning about how python is utilized for almost everything we do on the internet. I had a lot of fun learning about html, xml and json with Dr. Chuck, who made the concepts easy to learn and understand. The homework assignments allowed you to better understand the lecture material by providing ways for you to practice what was learned. I can't wait to begin the 4th module of this specialization. I highly recommend this course if you've enjoyed the 1st and 2nd modules.

By Jeff N

Feb 7, 2016

Outstanding Course for a newby. All about programming. Lectures and problems are clear and relate directly to the subject not related topics like statistics and other disciplines which add nothing to the Python and Python programming focus. Dr. Severance has built a great specialization here. Problems can be challenging but doable within the time frame represented by the course description (give or take a couple hours on some of the more challenging ones. I've learned alot! Thanks

By Ian F

Apr 21, 2020

Great course. A lot of fun!. I'm a finance guy that knew a little bit about data structure only in MS Access that could modify the sql in there a little bit. I figured I could use the quarantine to learn something new at night and on the weekends.

I started the first class to get an understanding of python so I could take the statistics classes with python. Decided to try and finish out the specialization first. Glad I did. On to the next...

Thanks Dr. Chuck and support team!

By Artjom S

Jan 18, 2016

I like this course, but for me it was a little bit harder to understand some basic stuff. Ie, in JSON for me was confusing to hear "a list of dictionaries".

Furthermore I didn't know what kind of operations I need to apply to them -- therefore I was checking for types of integers and even "brute forcing" a combinations of possible operations.

As I have finished this course, I'l definitely check again previous chapters to build a better fundamentals in my head.

Thank you dr Chuck!

By Rodolpho M I

Jul 7, 2020

Like the first two courses from Python for Everybody specialization, I liked it so much. The material is excellent, Dr. Chuck is clear while he is explaining the concepts and all the codes through the classes. But, in this third course, we saw contents like regular expressions and how to extract and use web data in Python, which are more complex than all the contents of the first two courses. So, because of that, I think this course could have more exercises for us to practice.

By 王桢

Sep 2, 2017

It's more about width rather than depth in this course because learning and using all of the skill in accessing and processing web data through python needs to spend far more time than this. Still this course provides me a good start and a broad understanding of what's going on with areas such as regular expression, XML, Json, API and python's connection with them. I even got some skill and code in my computer to do some tricky operation on the web with python and it is good.

By Brian D H I

Sep 22, 2020

This course is great! After reading some of the other reviews I think some people missed the point, some said that the course was too difficult but I disagree, the level of difficulty was perfect, Dr. Chuck thought you enough to be able to complete the assignments as long as you really tried and not so much that you would just need to copy and paste the answer from the lectures. I loved this course and I'll continue to take the next one in the coursera specialization.

By Calvin K

Jun 10, 2017

Man, I love Dr Chuck! He explains things in a way that's incredibly easy for anyone to understand. I finished the course in just a couple of days as I'm already quite familiar with Python and most of the stuff and just wanted to use the course as a refresher and checked see if there's any knowledge point that I was missing, but this course is awesome and I recommend it to anyone who's new to getting data from the web! I think I'll take all Dr Chuck's courses in the future!

By Jay T

Nov 16, 2020

This was the first course out of the specialization where i had NO prior knowledge and I must say, Dr. Chuck makes the learning process so fun and rewarding. I am happy that we learned XML first and then he saved the best for last with JSON and it did feel easier. I would recommend py4e not only to python beginners, but to ALL computer science beginners. This is the root to your computer science adventure and the options after this are truly limitless. Rock on Dr. Chuck!

By Sambath M

Mar 28, 2020

I'm very happy that people like you guys are doing this awesome project which is free teaching.

I loved the course from Dr Chuck, and I learned a lot in this one, about playing and analyzing data in its globality.

I also learn how data travel through the Internet, and I was captivated by all the process a Data has to do to be read by a user.

Overall this course is fascinating, and a big thank you to Dr Chuck & All the staff that make this course possible. I love you all.

By Carlos H

Jun 18, 2016

Great class. Goes over the basics of pulling data from online sources: HTML, XML, JSON. Also goes over the basics of those 3 so if you know nothing about those, the class is helpful. Coming from knowing literally zero about Python and starting from course 1, this is the first course out of the specialization where the assignments were a little tougher and took some googling. (PS I'm using Python 3, so it may be a little more straight forward with 2, I'm not sure though)