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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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!

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. :)