Ratings and Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

It's so good to make progress. It would be much better that if the description of the assignment is clearer .

Short lectures and lots of coding. Great course.

Good Intro part for pandas. The homework part is more difficult than the materials. Materials could have been more organized.

Requires a tremendous amount of self-study and trial and error if you're starting from ground zero in terms of pandas knowledge, but the reward is a level of comfort and facility with pandas dataframe manipulation. Definitely a learning by doing experience. Cleaning datasets and manipulating dataframes turns out to be pretty fun once you start getting the hang of it.

The assignments are great, but many needed knowledge is not covered in the lectures. I believe this is by design and recommend re-balancing the lectures by covering more needed skills to solve assignments.

This course is not for new learners of Python

I have decided to drop this course. I have worked very hard on Assignment #3 for the course and can't seem to get back from the grader anything more than "Your solution file either prints output to the console (e.g. through the print() function, or it fails to run (e.g. throws an error). You must make sure that the py or ipynb file which you submit does not have errors. The output we received from the ipthon interpretor was:" That's all I seem to get back.

An excellent course except in the last Week in the last video. The material is not obvious.

I was really excited about the this course, and was really let down. This course is really, really poorly done. I would not waste time and money on this course when there are much better options out there. I feel like I've gotten little in return for my time and money. First, there is no accompanying book (only slides). A self-contained accompanying book is a valuable resource, helping students prepare for lecture, and serving as a reference manual later on (I still regularly use my Coursera book on introductory Python). That there is no pdf reference for this class is indefensible (both of the other coursera courses I’ve had access to have had excellent self-contained books that followed the lecture). Instead, the student is directed to several other books they can purchase elsewhere. Second, as several other students have noted, the timeframe for assignments is really unrealistic, taking much longer than projected (at least for me, and several other students). This is not acceptable when Coursera bills by the month. Coursera needs to provide a better assessment of the time commitments for the class. Moreover, several of the in-video quizzes are disconnected from the material, often requiring extra research. Consulting other resources is fine (it’s part of coding), but the point of the quizzes should be to give the student practice implementing a concept that was just introduced. Third, the teaching is horrific. The professor is not engaging at all, but simply mechanically reads lines which often sound straight out of a user manual. The point of online videos is not to turn books into audio files- it’s to have a human talk/reason through problems with you. The teacher of the course should discuss the material, not recite a manual. A great example of well-done online teaching is Dr. Chuck Severance, whose videos the teachers of this course would do well to consult. In addition, the material is presented far too quickly. Fourth, the title of this course is a misnomer: an introduction to data science would provide an overview of the tools, techniques and scope of the field. An extremely detailed introduction to Pandas, which is essentially what most of this course is, is useful if well executed (which it is not here), but it is not an introduction to data science. A more minor complaint is the absolutely horrendous choice of the background. Showing different permutations of lifeless office drones is not exactly inspiring material for aspiring data scientists, even if this the reality of office life- it’s distracting at best, and at worst, deeply disparaging. Why not have just a plain colored background? Or anything else? The experience of this class is making me question whether I will ever pay for a Coursera course again. The amount of time I’ve wasted on pointless exercises is not warranted by what I’ve learned from this class- in retrospect I would have learned more just by purchasing one of the books referred to in the class introduction.

A fair introduction with good exercises, but the questions in the homework can be more clearly stated.