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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Python for Data Science, AI & Development by IBM

4.6
stars
35,197 ratings

About the Course

Kickstart your learning of Python with this beginner-friendly self-paced course taught by an expert. Python is one of the most popular languages in the programming and data science world and demand for individuals who have the ability to apply Python has never been higher. This introduction to Python course will take you from zero to programming in Python in a matter of hours—no prior programming experience necessary! You will learn about Python basics and the different data types. You will familiarize yourself with Python Data structures like List and Tuples, as well as logic concepts like conditions and branching. You will use Python libraries such as Pandas, Numpy & Beautiful Soup. You’ll also use Python to perform tasks such as data collection and web scraping with APIs. You will practice and apply what you learn through hands-on labs using Jupyter Notebooks. By the end of this course, you’ll feel comfortable creating basic programs, working with data, and automating real-world tasks using Python. This course is suitable for anyone who wants to learn Data Science, Data Analytics, Software Development, Data Engineering, AI, and DevOps as well as a number of other job roles....

Top reviews

MA

May 16, 2020

The syllabus of the course takes you in a roller-coaster ride.

From basic level to advance level and you won't feel any trouble nor hesitate a bit.

It's easy, it's vast, and it's really usefull.

TM

Nov 17, 2019

it becomes easier wand clearer when one gets to complete the assignments as to how to utilize what has been learned. Practical work is a great way to learn, which was a fundamental part of the course.

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51 - 75 of 6,171 Reviews for Python for Data Science, AI & Development

By Mahmood H

•

Mar 11, 2019

The videos are quick, had to keep rewinding to grasp at the details. A slower pace would help beginners.

By Maximilian M M

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Apr 9, 2021

I wanna be completely honest with this course:

To me prerequisites:

I'm a coding beginner. Had some classes in University about programming with C and Java but just learned basic concepts like what are functions.

The course first gave me some really interesting insights. The Videos are super helpful and also the first two weeks of exercises were really helpful.

But as I moved further, the exercises got super hard. At least for coding beginners. Personally from week 3 on it just felt like that they don'T really wanna teach you coding but just showing you how it's done. For example they show you how you can Webscrape or convert dictonairies to lists but you can't really code them by yourself. The most frequend command I executed was running the code already in the cells.

When you are a beginner: Try to learn python with another course or source. You will get super frustrated with this course. If you are familar with other langauges or python it will be easy I think.

By Mike R J

•

Mar 13, 2023

This class taught me almost nothing without even the professor taking part in any of the videos. How am I supposed to know if the professor actually cares about teaching this course that he didn't even do the videos about? There were obvious errors throughout that I know are true because I have years of computer science & programming experience. I got nothing out of this course until Week 4 when it had an interesting take on open(, pandas & NumPy. The last 2 Weeks are good enough for me to go back over to make it so I can get the most out of the money the company I work for paid for this course. Hopefully what I learn in the last 2 week segments will make it so I will actually learn pieces that I will not just learn better from some textbook or searching the web to go to places like GeeksforGeeks.

My apologies for the negativity, but I just want everyone to know, if you have computer science or Python experience, it's probably best spending time on a textbook that is well used throughout different universities or areas.

It's not like the course isn't possible to get something out of, I'm just expressing my opinion of what I got from it. If you really want to spend money on a course that has a teacher that doesn't care enough to make the videos him or herself in the course...I wouldn't recommend it, just because of the caring aspect. Once again my opinion, take it as you will.

By Martin A C

•

Feb 19, 2023

Extremely simple and fundamental, obviously aimed at people who know practically nothing about programming. The problem is that the best way to learn to program is by programming, which is not encouraged here. Analogy: Here they teach you the theory of how to swim but they only let you enter the pool for 5 minutes. Not recommended for truly learning to code (2 STARs) EDIT: 1 STAR Many typos and math errors. Unforgivable

By Cristina A

•

Apr 12, 2019

The final assignment was not well explained, was hard to follow and the previous material in class was not intuitive to the task.

By Kavish J

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Oct 30, 2020

yeah , slightly the worst teaching skills

By Sergio S S

•

Dec 30, 2018

I had done other Python introductory courses and this one was excellent, if not the best, very clear and well organized, a pity that the final assignment is somewhat chaotic, too easy and outdated. They should take care of the final works as a way to give additional value to the work we do when studying it.

By Mustafa E A

•

Jul 30, 2021

Great course! 

easily accessible online Labs for immediate practice. No need to waste time dealing with the issues that come up when downloading, installing & setting up a development environment.

By Allen C

•

Jan 5, 2024

It was ultimately a helpful course, but had typos, errors, and grammatical mistakes. The exercises were helpful, but it seemed each one was created by a different person, and the quality varied considerably. I ended up using ChatGPT frequently to clarify things further. Helpful, but could use some polishing.

By Micaël O

•

Feb 18, 2019

Good course for beginners but not very detailed

By Urs H

•

Mar 4, 2019

Content OK, some errors on the video slides.

By Lena N

•

Sep 9, 2018

I had some programming knowledge (C++, matlab) when I begun this course. It was easy to complete but I tried to make it more challenging by paying extra attention to the details. The questions that popped up while watching the videos were good at making it somewhat interactive. The quizzes were maybe too easy (most of them had only three questions per quiz). I found the labs very helpful, could use some more practice exercises. It felt like a self-paced course, I would like it if the instructors were more involved in the forums and the grading. Basically, the questions at the forums were answered by fellow students (if someone could help) and also the grading was exclusively by peer-grading. All in all you can gain from the course by putting some personal effort..it also makes it easy to just browse through the questions and get a completed mark nonetheless.

By Syed I B S A

•

May 22, 2021

There were a few things I really struggled with on this course. Firstly I am a reader, not so good with the videos. So it would have been much easier for me to follow if there were clearer reference material rather than mainly videos. I learnt nearly exclusively off the pynb, but I noticed quite a few of the questions specifically asked about the videos. Secondly, more explanations as to why we are doing something, maybe make it more task oriented. i.e., We are looking for this, this is how you would go about finding it, etc. I didn't understand most of the time why I was performing a task or why this was shown to me. Lastly, it would have been much easier to follow if it would explain what every step, code, function etc was explained. I really struggled with week 5 because I could not understand what each step was meant to produce.

By Brenda B M

•

Mar 13, 2019

The illustrations were excellent, the pauses for quizzes were abrupt and disturbing, the Fake album cover was not relevant to any business use I would have, and the materials were out of order in the listing. I eventually and painfully figured out a solution using a function I created from the clues I had at hand.

The 2D NumPy quiz was a mystery to me. Too much material was presented all at once and I probably confused some concepts in 2D. I have never used matrix math before...

By Samantha R

•

Mar 14, 2019

The course was informative with useful elements to use

However the final assignment had nothing to do with the whole course. the labs were just touching on the code and I expected the final assignment to put everything into practice. The instructions also not clear in the assignment - I got more help off the discussion forums else I would have never completed the final tasks

By Julia B

•

Feb 10, 2019

Not the best course imo: almost no relevant exercises, there are visible small mistakes and formatting errors present. It seems, that authors didn't put too much effort to make the course to be of really high standard. It's good if you need to get a certificate in this field quickly but don't expect to obtain much of knowledge.

By Sasikanth I

•

Feb 5, 2020

It might give you all the things that you need for programming in AI and data science but dosent give enough practice to make you feel comfortable with what they teach. They could give few assignments to better the course instead of rushing which overloads the information to be understood and remembered

By Jarrod W

•

May 11, 2019

Honestly I found the course great but found the last assignment really hard. I legit had to use the Discussion board to help me do this assignment an even then i have no clue what I am doing. The instructions were really vague and wasn't pointed to being a complete beginner.

By Shawn G

•

May 11, 2020

The content was good, but as with most online programming courses, there simply are not enough coding exercises to effectively retain the knowledge long term.

By Jeffrey G D

•

Apr 9, 2019

There were some errors in the notebook code and some of the video quizes asked questions about things that hadn't been covered yet.

By Samir S

•

Feb 15, 2019

Final exam poorly designed and written. Frustrating experience trying to find solutions. Needs a rethink and more structure.

By Ahmed H

•

Apr 18, 2019

the questions given in the final project are not covered by the course materials

By Emily N

•

Oct 28, 2020

The course is super frustrating, the robot voice for the videos makes it so difficult to digest the information, the cadence and focus on certain words is completely wrong, so it makes it so hard to understand, especially when introducing new terms. Given that a lot of the information is presented on slides its really tricky to read at your own pace with the correct intonations and also see the code on the video. It seems really lazy to not have a person with subject knowledge read the video material in a much more engaging way (as with all other Coursera courses I've tried) - this would make the material much easier to engage with and less like I've just installed a text to voice reader on a wikipedia page.

I also think some more real life application based would make it much easier to engage with the material - when I've looked at other courses (e.g. Khan academy, codeacademy, they at least explain 'for loops can be applied for example in XXX'. The labs are good, but the videos have to be some of the least engaging videos on programming that I have ever come across!!

Also, Also, a lot of terms are introduced without any explanation as to their function. In the videos sometimes terms are just introduced on the screen e.g. '_init_ ' but with no explanation whatsoever as to what this means or when it's used. This is meant to be a beginner course and provide knowledge to apply in a workplace setting going forward, but I find myself constantly googling to get background information on Python code. As an example, I messaged my friend (who is teaches python in a university) who gave a brief explanation to 'init: "Short for initialise. When you create an object of any type, you either create a real one or a default one. So for the circle example, a default circle could be the unit circle, but you (as a programmer) may want a 5 inch circle so you would use the class constructor to initialise / override the default values" .

This kind of simple background explanations would go a long way to actually teaching people how to understand what the code is doing, and the background of it and why you use it, so that you are actually more capable of applying this in a future setting. It also helps make the course a lot more human, rather than trying to teach it in a way where you can only remember the code but not actually understand what any of it means or does!

I'm really disappointed with this course, I hope the other IBM python courses are better!!

By Hani H

•

Mar 15, 2022

It's funny how the last thing we learned about is beautiful soup, because that's exactly how I would describe the course , except for the beautiful part. It's ugly.

First of all the course lacks organization. You learn how to import CSVs in the begining of week four, and how to import JSON files at the end of week 5. Wouldnt it make more sense if the two topics were covered together? and no I did not need to know what a JSON file is before learning how to import it. It's enough to teach me how its structured.

And this philosophy is carried all over the course. It seems like IBM is confusing the forest for the trees. The module working with webscrapping had two vidoes explaining the communication between client and resource, and two other videos on web scrapping itself. IBM, listen to me, teach me practical skills, I can use beatuful soup without understanding how it works under the hood. Spend that time on things that actually matters.

Okay fine, the course is a mess, but did I learn something useful? yes, but that's thanks to the many tutorials I read/watched on other websites. This course jumps from covering the absolute basics to flashing an advanced concepts and moving on. For example, we learned how to create a simple dataframes, but grouping and aggregation, the stuff that actually matters, was only flashed on the screen for 5 seconds in a video on APIs. How am I supposed to do analysis without learning about aggregation? Well thanks to youtube I can. If this course is useful for anything its to point you to the right direction. Self study is essential.

The lab sessions are borderline useless, 90% of the exercises are super basic and were covered in the lectures, but are these any example datasets to work on? is there a multi step analysis to complete? are there any problems that go beyond creating a smile 1 line of code? not really. That's up to you to do on your own.

I'm comparing this course with the Google Analytics module on R, the difference is night and day. This is simply a low effort attempt. I expected better.