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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Using Python to Access Web Data by University of Michigan

4.8
stars
43,904 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....
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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.

ML

Jun 16, 2017

Excellent course with in depth explanations. It is well structured. It learn to access Web Data from very basics to optimum level. It help me to understand details of using Python to Access Web Data.

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7551 - 7575 of 7,921 Reviews for Using Python to Access Web Data

By Fabricio A B C

Aug 21, 2020

El curso es muy básico para aprender Acces Web data, pero para usar python con Acces Web Data siendo principiante con python supongo que esta esta bien, los ejercicios son muy sencillo a excepciona de uno que otro que el programa ejemplo te puede llegar a confundir y entorpecer un poco si dependes mucho de el. Tiene un toque de dejar a un lado la explicacion a profundidad en algunos aspecto para ser mas practico, pero como dije, en lo elemental.

By Tolga S

Apr 17, 2016

All in all, I liked the class. I would like to learn about this topic and the database access using Python, and I still think this is a very good beginning. I like the enthusiasm of the instructor, but I think he short sells many of the things he is teaching. I would also suggest providing more challenging assignments, for instance, as optional ones. These may be such that they require reading the referred text in addition to watching the videos.

By Wenjia Z

Mar 1, 2021

for real beginners of python whose knowledge mainly comes from the previous two courses in this specialization, this course is not good enough - the content is very different from the basics in the previous two courses and is not well explained. Assignments are not so difficult (if the student reads the codes from examples provided by the instructor), but it can be frustrating not to understand the point of the codes. TA can be more supportive.

By Abbas J

Oct 18, 2020

This was one of the weaker courses in the specialization. While urllib has it's uses, requests should have been introduced as well (and the course should have been longer). A more in-depth treatment of BeautifulSoap was also warranted.

More real-world examples, as well as more exercises, quizzes and assignments would have made this course much better.

Dr. Severance remains an outstanding teacher who can and should challenge his students more.

By Warnakulasuriya S A F

May 6, 2020

I would have rated 5 stars but, in my point of view I think this course is just beyond the limits for a beginner. Some facts were quite hard to understand and some codes were too hard to catch upon. Overall, the course I think is not that great for a beginner, as the name of the course'Python For Everybody, everyone should be able to understand the facts. But, It's always a pleasure getting into a course like this and learn something new.

By Sarah H

Jun 1, 2020

This was a large jump from courses 1 and 2 in the specialization. This course is not self-contained and there are really two tracks to get through it. The first involves tweaking existing code but not necessarily understanding everything (which is actually fine), the second is doing lots of research online (also fine - it's ok if a course facilitates learning rather than teaching everything but not sure it's at an 'everybody' level).

By Kaminskaya S

Oct 28, 2020

Comparing to the previous courses of the specialization this one is awful. I'm thinking about to drop it. By now I've completed almost 4 weeks. I liked the first week (it is the best week of the course), second week lessons aren't profound and the others weeks are kind of a mess. I hope last weeks were designed better. Being honest I feel disappointed because I haven't happened to learn as much as I learned from the courses 1 and 2.

By Levin F

Jan 21, 2018

I have rated the two previous python courses with five stars. What changed now is that I have realized that I didn't have enough practice all along. I really wish they added practices which are not mandatory but still fully supported by the auto-grader. I really don't think this is too much to ask for, considering I am paying $50 per month. Otherwise: good lessons, challenging practices, and great support from the course forum.

By CJ

Jun 15, 2020

Although I finished this course, I do not think I can directly apply what I learned to solve real world problems. It seems like I have to watch some more YouTube videos teaching web scrapping. It is surely always good to know the background knowlege behind things, say how web standards are set up, but solving real problems is the gist. I am pessimistic about how this course will help me achieve that after I finish the course.

By David W

Aug 26, 2020

The web services portion of the Python for Everybody specialization seems out of place; an introduction to an introductory course in web scraping. It was somewhat informative. However, I was more interested in developing basic Python programming skills (e.g. writing functions, classes, decorators, etc) to solve problems. Parsing data from websites did not interest me. Happy to finish.

By Jeffrey W

Apr 17, 2018

This course was good but still slightly disappointing. I feel that the teacher should've more thoroughly explained a couple of the topics on the course, including hyperlinks, anchor tags, and how the material in the course connects with the real internet. Additionally, the homework assignments were a little too hard and introduced topics that were not thoroughly covered in the videos.

By Oleksandr P

May 13, 2021

I did have a background of around 3 months of learning Python so I was able to go through the course in 3 days. Comparing to other online course materials very extremely easy and assignments were simply "change a few lines" from what you saw in the lecture. For beginners might be a good fit, but wasn't for me. The only reason I stuck with it to get that certificate for my linkedin

By jose c

Jul 14, 2019

El contenido del curso es denso, sin embargo el Dr. Chuck nuevamente explica detalladamente que esta sucediendo en el código, como facilitar el trabajo con el uso de librerías que son muy útiles para este tipo de tareas, el curso en lineas generales es confuso pero no porque haya habido una mala explicación del mismo solo que el contenido del curso lleva tiempo entenderlo.

By Valen A N

May 19, 2020

It was good as an overview course for someone who already knows a lot about the web. However, a beginner can have difficulties coping up with the course because many topics are simply bombarded on you and they are fairly technical. This is the reason why you should not take this course if you do not see yourself using the information from this course anytime in the future.

By Davide C

Jun 6, 2016

The course was a bit too shallow for me, the techniques shown are very basic examples of what can be learnt using stock python libraries (json, socket, urllib, ElementTree) or external (BeautifulSoup).

I really expected something more, for instance authentication techniques, or methods to parse complex websites, rather or in addition to the basics shown here.

By John L J

Mar 19, 2020

The course is solid, and give a great down and dirty, fast paced understanding of the subject matter. My only con is your REALLY need to pay attention to every aspect of the codes otherwise you will miss key information necessary to make the assignments doable instead of hair pulling frustrations. However once you find that everything falls into place.

By Sushma R

Jul 3, 2020

I left some of the concepts were too fast, As the course says it is for beginner he should have went bit slow and stressed some important programs and I didn't understand when he suddenly jumped on topic to topic to fast, whenever he teaches a topic he wants to give two three examples and then go to new, but he was fast and he was in a hurry

By Jayant G

Sep 15, 2020

The Assignments were not challenging at all they did not make me think much and also the course material was not in more in detail especially the material for Week 6 where I expected to learn more about REST Architecture but I wasn't much emphasized and also the part where BeautifulSoup was explained could have gone in more detail.

By Jesse O

Jul 13, 2020

Dr. Chuck is great, and I love his lectures. My only issue is the assignments were very challenging (for me, at least), and there is zero help to guide you. No prompts, no nothing. I find it completely crushes motivation when moving nicely through the course. The final assignment of this course took me all day, using external help.

By Maria S

Mar 12, 2021

This course provides a good overview of how to use Python to access web data. It is less helpful in terms of teaching you the actual coding to do so. So you will learn what is within the realm of the possible. You will likely still need a lot of studying and practicing beyond this course to be able to do it independently yourself.

By Aditya K

Oct 1, 2016

The course did give me the the theoretical and syntactical basics in terms of how web programming is done using python. Chuck Severance is brilliant in his ability to explain complex concepts by reasoning via analogy. It would have helped if the problem sets were more challenging and in tune with real world applications.

By Aly T

Jul 1, 2017

The quality of the documentation for this course dropped off compared to the first two classes. The problems are complex enough for first time programmers that it can be difficult to follow. Reviewing the discussion forums is barely helpful because the salient details get redacted to the point of being unhelpful.

By Judith T

Aug 11, 2017

This course had way too many explanatory gaps around encoding and decoding - yes, I understand what they are, but not when to introduce them into the program and not always how to call them - and around parsing XML. I ultimately could not get the library recommended to work at all and used an alternate library.

By Swati C

Aug 14, 2019

Not as informative as the previous 2 courses in this specialization. The instructor had to skim lightly over a few code chunks, not deep enough of a dive. It's a good introductory course to accessing web data, but left the impression that there's a lot more to be learnt if one wants to specialize in this area.

By Sarthak B

Apr 7, 2021

The course should have been more in deep with a little bit of more explanation for Chapters related to XML & JSON. Considering that this is a beginner's level course, the course should have been more well constructed, including basics of the API key code, parsing, what OAuth & other functions actually do.