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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Using Databases with Python by University of Michigan

4.8
stars
21,177 ratings

About the Course

This course will introduce students to the basics of the Structured Query Language (SQL) as well as basic database design for storing data as part of a multi-step data gathering, analysis, and processing effort. The course will use SQLite3 as its database. We will also build web crawlers and multi-step data gathering and visualization processes. We will use the D3.js library to do basic data visualization. This course will cover Chapters 14-15 of the book “Python for Everybody”. To succeed in this course, you should be familiar with the material covered in Chapters 1-13 of the textbook and the first three courses in this specialization. This course covers Python 3....
Highlights
High quality course material

(143 Reviews)

Top rated instructor

(176 Reviews)

Top reviews

MM

Mar 12, 2018

The course is great... You can definitely learn many things... Was kind of hard for me and i went many times back and forth through most of the lectures... However i think i learn many new things....

JG

Jun 16, 2016

This course was great! I enjoyed parsing different types of data: from documents and the web. This course is definitely (rudimentary) a must take course for anyone who wants to go into data science.

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26 - 50 of 3,196 Reviews for Using Databases with Python

By Thomas T

May 16, 2019

Assignment for week 5 is very poorly instructed and very confused . Spending more time on the assignment than the course. The assignment should said add a new address to the end of file or beginning of file or should say something about highlighting or editing an image. I don't have image editor on my new Mac computer and had to download it for this class.

By Tabish A

Aug 19, 2020

My Assignment 5 got stuck, and I am unable to change my answer again. I was doing this course for a week, And now I am unable to get my certificate

By Ujjwal P R

May 14, 2020

I am really disappointed by the Week 5 peer graded assignment issue.

By Esmerelda M B D M

Jul 22, 2020

I am in the midst of completing the 5th course in the Python for Everybody Specialization, I have no programming background prior to taking the 1st course and have learnt a lot from these courses. I put in effort and the hours studying the materials provided. Although, this course is unlike the first 2 courses in the specialization where we learned to write codes, I gained knowledge by doing due diligence in researching and experimenting codes to help in excelling all assignments. Make use of lecture videos, textbook and code examples all available for us students, dedicate your focus and time to achieve your academic goals, get rid of spoon-fed mentality, you will thank yourself! Forums are there, segregated by week to post questions where your peers and Dr.Chuck’s team of teaching assistants will help you out; having said that, please do read pinned messages by teaching staff in week forum before attempting assignments for detailed grading process. I really enjoyed taking these courses including this 4th one and look forward in completing the capstone project in the following final course. Thank you Dr. Chuck and team at UM and Coursera for making these courses available remotely!

By Saman M A M

Apr 9, 2020

This course helped me to understand the basics of databases, in this case, sqllite, then I learned how to create Table in a database using python programming, then Dr.chuck taught us as how to use our previously learned material in a practical example. How to read a file from the internet, then parse it in json and then creating a database and finally visualize the data.

I strongly recommend this course and its amazing instructor.

By RAJPUT R G S

Mar 6, 2019

This course is well designed to get fast launching in programming & talking to data with python. As the name suggests " Python For Everybody ", courses in this specialization really signifies that.

By Lammel M

Sep 7, 2017

This Python3 course is EXTREMELY sloppy compared to the earlier Python2 version.

Chuck acts as if he is really tired of making this course.

Examples: Chuck writes on the white slide with yellow. Later with yellow pen on the yellow database icon. One has to pause, look closer.

Chuck copy pastes the SQL code. It is not provided for us as a text, so I pause the video for 15 minutes and start typing.

SQL command should be UPPERCASE, but sqlite doesn't care apparently, but this wasn't discussed.

And there are dozens of things like this.

By Michael K

Feb 6, 2020

Far too simplistic assignments

By Javier

Apr 5, 2023

TL;dr. Disappointed course in the specialization. Old-fashioned teaching style, poor material, useless assignments and too much filled material. Find another course to learn the basics of Python if you can.

First things first: if you want to learn about how to use Python, how it interacts with databases and how to write code to build a database, this course is not for you as it only shows code previously written with little to nonexistent opportunities to practice your coding skills. It's a course about databases and SQLite with a few Python programs already built.

With that being said, the course has the same structure of the courses 1-3 and this is its first flaw. Repeated videos and content in the first week and then lectures, assignments and filler videos who want to be interesting but most of them don't add valuable knowledge.

The lectures are all provided in videos, with intensive use of slides, which I honestly consider a poor and old-fashioned approach to teaching a subject, especially one as practical as programming. It's evident at times that the instructor has repeated himself so many times that he rushes from one slide to another without properly explaining important concepts.

About the concepts, like courses 2 and specially 3, this one repeats the "don't worry about it, just type this code we provide you and if it works, it will be fine, you don't need to understand" approach. Again, I believe this is not the best approach to teach programming languages, especially if you're a beginner.

The assignments difficulty ranges from medium-easy to joke. The first few weeks they can be resumed in something like "take the same code we've explained in a previous video, modify or add two lines and then submit it". I don't see how I could improve my programming skills by doing this.

Special mention to the fifth week assignment. When I see the word "visualization" in the title I thought it would be aboutt grab some public data from the internet, put in into a database and then use Python to make some charts, diagrams or whatever. It would have been great...instead we're provided with two different Python programs, a JavaScript file ¿? and an HTML and told that we add a new line into a file, run the programs and provide a screenshot to complete the assignment. Again, I don't know how doing this would increase my programming skills and also, although I'm only a beginner, I think Python is capable of doing much more in data visualization apart from this.

By Vishal T

Jan 10, 2021

just read the comments of the reviewer...it appears to be that they are acting like a dictator. especially the teaching assistant for whom I can understand their pain because rest of their life they will be living on a very measly salary as a post-doc and Ph.D. and even after that and probably will not have any life as well....they need to calm down a little it is just an online line beginner course...you will not be becoming a billionaire after this course. I would strongly recommend not to buy this course...you will be wasting your money.

By Ravi M

Apr 25, 2023

Coursera is one of the best platforms to learn anything, but in this course, when I just finished it, there was one peer-to-peer review assignment where I had to score more than 80%, but the max I got was 70%. The rest 10% is given by the course teacher, which I don't think I can pass, and if I try to unenroll, then there is no option for this. I hope Coursera will work on this and improve their services. or else give me the rest 10% to pass the assigment with minimum 80% score.

By Matthew B

Mar 2, 2016

No teaching. Just a guy talking. Do the problem sets for practice. If you need help, pause the videos and try the code out yourself.

Seriously though, a programming course where the teacher is not actively type out the code but just scribbling around it. He doesn't work through code but talks around the concepts.

By Hakan T

Dec 31, 2019

Horrible TAs. They should all be changed. They are extremely rude and annoying.

By Kaiquan M

Nov 14, 2021

This course was a good introduction to the concept of: -'Objects', classes, methods in Python -SQLite -Refresher of basic SQL statements, JOINs, WHERE clause, ORDER BY, LIMIT -Basics of a good data model in a relational database, multi-table relations, -One to one, one to many and many-to-many relationships -Working with the instructor's 'Twitter' API -The end-to-end geocoding process using Google Maps, from >getting a set of locations to >constructing the URL string, >querying the URL, >retrieving results in JSON, >loading geocoding results into the SQLite database, >retrieving the geocoding dataset for visualising on a web page using Google Maps For almost every assignment, the instructor put in effort to provide a primer/base python script for you to analyse and validate your understanding. From there, you will work to understand what the actual assignment wants you to do and work on your coding assignment. Overall, this course struck a good balance between being too easy (and not having any coding exercises at all) and being too challenging (where some courses do not provide any primer material at all, leaving learners to struggle). For learners with some background in SQL, you will come out of this course having more confidence in working with objects, classes, methods and the end-to-end geocoding process. Just put in the effort and work your way through the content!Helpful

By ASHISH B

Sep 28, 2020

Dr. Chuck, a long time ago, probably 2 years ago or so, I enrolled in your first Python course after trying several times to learn programming with no success. Before my enrollment, I was deeply impressed by the fact that you're so courteous and generous to allow everybody to use your precious teaching materials (books, slides, videos, etc.) for no charge. I thought to myself, "Not so many people do this these days, who is this guy??". After watching the first video, I could not stop ever since. Your presentations are outstanding and quite engaging. Your sense of humor is amazing. The effort that you put into your slides never went unnoticed. The writing style of your Python book is very nice. Everything you say or write shows how passionate you are about your work. But, what is even more impressing is the amount of time and effort that you give for no charge to help others. Obviously, you could have made thousands of dollars if you used your time and efforts otherwise, but, fortunately, you chose another route, which, in fact, pays off in the long run. Probably, you did not get as much money as you deserve, but you helped many thousands of people who needed help and made them so much grateful to you. Now, thousands of people in all corners of the world know about the unique, quality work that you deliver.

By David W

Dec 26, 2015

Dr. Chuck is an excellent teacher. This is true particularly because he is so passionate about the subject and skilled in both the craft as well as helping others to learn it.

For me, learning databases has been a very fun and liberating study. I needed it. I have been planning my own version of a personal finance application with all of the features and customization that I want in it for some time now. Learning databases was and is an important step in reaching the knowledge level that I think I need to attempt my project with some probability of success and happiness with the end product. I have done some event-driven programming in Python, and have messed around in someone else's GUI in that class, but designing and implementing my own GUI won't be easy. Thanks to Dr. Chuck's class series, however, I feel much more confident that I can go out there and review the different third party GUI libraries and see if any will get the job done for now.

Alternatively, the University where Dr. Chuck teaches also has a web design certificate that seems like it might be useful. If GUI programming is too hard I might go with a web version since I have heard that Javascript, particularly jquery and D3 would make my task of graphing and presenting financial data quite doable.

By yeshwanth

Jan 17, 2016

Great course, So far one of the best I have seen in this planet.

There is always room to improve the best to take it a notch up..... This is what I would do to make it better.

1.Supply ton of more information for each course so students who are interested might explore but the new and additional information. This dont have to interfere with the course. Just for additional informations so the students can get some more info if they wanted.

2.I like the fact that there is some industry talk someone who are in the Industry or who was in the industry who come and give a small tech talk ....please provide more motivational materials like this. Not all the time I want to see Mr. Chuck alone.

3.Please come to Toronto.

4.The reason I am able to finish this course because the assignments was easy .....IF it was hard forget it i would have quit long before...... this happens in lots of other coursers I take...Sorry its just me.

By Jason J

Dec 8, 2017

Once again, Dr. Chuck Severance delivers!

Two weeks ago, I knew nothing about JSON, databases and APIs. Now I'm working on an independent project and using the knowledge in this class to connect to databases with APIs, decode the information using a JSON library within python, and process the data to solve real world problems.

The free online book is a great start to each week of learning. If you first study the book and practice with the sample code in each chapter with your Atom program, you will do well. The lecture videos are solid and helpful, reinforcing the book material. The assignments are fair and sometimes a little too easy but for this 5 course beginner sequence, overall I believe they're right on the money. A huge thanks to Dr. Chuck and everyone involved in putting this course (and all 5 in this sequence) together! I'm looking forward to the capstone (5th course) in a few days.

By SBAST

Aug 14, 2017

Thanks for this very helpful course, the lectures are clear and to the point, and fun. Sometimes I needed to read the manual and some online documentation on the topic (python.org) more in depth , but everything was easy to access, and to understand with a little practice, trial and error. It is a comprehensive, hands-on introduction to the many possibilities of gathering and analyzing the data out there (on the web). The progress is gradual, with clever exercises to overcome common roadblocks. After this fourth course in the Python for Everybody specialization, I feel more confident for exploring the Python and SQL languages, and also other languages if need be. I also loved the bonuses, because they bring this whole creative world of programming to life. The Internet History, Technology and Security course is a good complement to these 4 courses. I look forward to the Capstone.

By Maloy M

Sep 13, 2016

Loved this course! Dr. Chuck makes it fun by adding the bonus material - office hours videos as well as the fantastic interviews with all the computing greats whose work we've used so far but haven't had any chance to interact. The course itself is great at explaining tricky topics including web architectures involving crawlers, search engines, data wrangling code etc. without turning off new learners.

The sql/ rdbms part eases learners into using DRI with without the actual declarations rather inserts and updates, but this is so vital a concept for databases that there could possibly be some bonus video explaining this with a little bit more rigor (as sqlite does support foreign key references). Nevertherless a great course keeping in mind that it primarily deals with programming in python rather than db code.

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 Mike T

Jan 16, 2016

Professor Chuck is my new hero. Ok, some would say that the course is very easy. In truth, it was for me, but I'm a professional programmer who fell in love with Python a few years ago and I'm always looking for excuses to just have fun with it. And although for someone with my experience it is was not a difficult course, I still learned some things from it, and the instructor is a great, down to earth lecturer who is clearly very passionate about teaching and Python, and well, traveling the world. ;) So even if you are an experienced programmer, then unless you are sure that you absolutely can't learn anything more about using Python to access SQL databases and you don't want to have a lot of fun, then take this course!

By Christopher T

Jan 5, 2018

I have been enjoying my journey through these courses by Dr. Chuck immensely. My only criticism is that sometimes the instructions for an assignment are a bit odd in wording, counter intuitive, even unclear. This issue may be more true of the previous course than this one. But the remedy if confused is the active and helpful forums. The mentors and teaching assistants are amazing, and often make pinned posts to guide students over hurdles, such as with the final assignment of this course and a problem with Google's API key. Still, the set-up, the skills learned, and most of all Dr. Chuck's engaging, easy to understand, and humorous lectures are well worth the time and price of admission.

By Charlie R

Mar 13, 2018

Lots of moving parts in this course! It ran the gamut of all the Python for Everybody courses so far, from file handling , line parsing, APIs, SQL, JSON, and html. -- My AHA! moment was looking at a restaurant review in nytimes.com. The article had a google map: I looked at the html code and sure enough, could spot the html script containing the JSON file listing the title, address, latitude, longitude, etc. That was very exciting to see our class work reflected in real world application. -- I look forward to the next course, the Capstone Project. I am very confident and excited for this next step in my education.

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 ;)