Very enjoyable and at times challenging.

Interesting, engaging and informative!

Fantastic and concise hands-on course!

Great course and very good material

best course i ve taken in coursera

Very professional, very productive

extremely multidisciplinary!

Good stuff. Thanks Coursera.

It was an amazing course!

The course is excellent.

Very useful course ,

Excellent course! =)

Excellent course..

Muy recomendable

Its gerearatttt

I'm loving it!

great course！

Very helpful

very good

Excellent

This course lies in the confluence of both my professional experience (software development in the IT industry) and the science that interests me the most: astronomy and astrophysics. Just a glance at the syllabus was enough to convince me that the course would be worth taking, due to its good structure and wide scope, covering current trends in both data science and computational astronomy.

From previous online course experience in these areas, I knew at the beginning that contents can be hard to grasp if the theory and practice are not well balanced, but it turned out to be a great run, with enough depth to pique one's interest while at the same time feeling comfortable using both past and newly acquired knowledge.

The course sports an excellent tool to solve and test the programming assignments that constitute most of the grades you will earn. Thanks to it, you will be freed, as a student, from the most common hassles in online courses involving coding (mainly environment setup). Which means more chances to focus on the main subjects covered and a pleasant wading through the challenges posed.

Beware that if you are already comfortable ín the programming language used (Python), you may easily be craving for more advanced assignments, but this I'm sure is easy to request from the helpful professors and staff. If you are instead a novice with regards to coding, additional parallel effort may be required, but the course contents will guide you well in the endeavor.

One aspect of the course that may be specially challenging is the relatively speedy run through the theory and concepts of Machine Learning. A myriad other online courses on the subject exist already; the course focusses instead more on the application of the techniques and nicely shows real world (or more appropriately, universe :-) ) applications which will help cementing the theories behind. I would expect that if you have not had previous contact with the subject, the contents can feel a bit daunting. But with some extra commitment (check the numerous online resources, take a parallel course...) I am pretty sure this can be overcome.

Generally, I liked the course and really enjoyed it; I think it is really well made. However, I decided to give it 4/5 stars, because it is a bit short, covers only a small part of astronomy and machine learning and because exercises are not that challenging and too much help is sometimes given. I'd give it 5 stars if the course was a bit longer (2-3 times as long), covered more astronomy and machine learning topics (with exercises as well), and maybe most importantly forced the participant to go through more materials to be able to finish the course. Nonetheless, I'd like to thank the course's creators!

Overall the course is great, I highly recommend it to astronomers who want to learn some new tricks in data science. Meanwhile, it is not so useful for everyone else - lections are super brief and superficial, coding assignments are very easy and not challenging at all, not only you have a pretty self-explanatory template (do A, do B), but it is possible to view a complete solution right away, which is rather strange approach.

So far, the first week has been interesting. Challenging because I am new to Python (I am a C/C++, Swift and ABAP developer) . The assignments are well guided - challenging but far from impossible.

I would like the videos to be a little longer or give a little more theoretical background but mostly it has the right amount of info.

I thought this class was a great application of Python Programming to an interesting topic that I otherwise would not have learned. However, coming from a computer science background, the programming was pretty easy. If you are looking to strictly learn more about programming, I would suggest a more difficult course.