Ratings and Reviews for Python Data Structures

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its a great course , great teacher,

Dr. Chuck has really involved me in this course. He made the studying process fun, engaging, and easy to learn and understand, making academic technical knowledge accessible for non-tech backgrounds students. Thank you very much! I look forward to the next course!

it was phenomenol

I am only giving this course a 4 star review and not full five star one because of the mentor (not the Instructor!) on the course - Tamara Brunnock. A more discouraging teaching staff is hard to imagine, I also speak as a teacher myself - I get asked a lot of questions of the same nature every day and when you are a teacher / mentor, you expect that and accept that and deal with every single question/request because it is the very nature of such a job and behaving otherwise is just wrong and you shouldn't be a teacher. Dr. Chuck has a duplicate of all of his lectures on Youtube and they aren't copies of Coursera videos - he made another set of videos and uploaded them online for everyone to use freely if they wish so and one of his videos is 13 hours long! I asked for help twice when I couldn't get around writing a code and kept getting a deviation from the desired output for days on end. The comments I received from Ms. Brunnock were not exactly helpful - they were vague and unspecific in my case, and she seems to be asking other learners questions why they are doing such and such in their codes as a way of guiding them, which sometimes works - again, I know this because I am a teacher myself and it is good to pose the right questions to a learner to make them think on the answer and see potential fault in what they have done before and not feed the correct answer right away. But in an area such as programming designed for 'EVERYBODY' in its VERY early stages (this is a second course in a series of five and I bet by the end of the fifth you'd hardly qualify as a knowledgeable Python person!) such technique will not work with the majority and I have browsed through previous months and years of communication between learners and Ms Brunnock and got reassured of my initial take on her this very strategy, i.e. lots of people were posting that they did not get the comment by her or they were just confused more and one guy even begged to just tell him where the mistake was in his suggested answer. I am not saying mentors should give a straight out answer - definitely not! A learner should work on their own and we are all grown-ups here so self-study it is most of the time. I get it. I never posted requests before checking at least ten or fifteen posts and reading them all and I confess, I found some of them helpful even when people did not. It was like sieving though sand and mud to get to the gold specks of real valid help which was not at the same time violating the Coursera code of conduct by providing answers. And I thank her for this effort. HOWEVER! HOWEVER! Back to my two unhelpful comments - when her feedback was unhelpful and raised even more questions on my side, I asked those and NEVER got a reply. I waited a few days and since I was progressing quite quickly time-wise, I wanted to get the answers - Were my codes alright besides the fact that they worked? Could they be made better, more concise? Were they user-friendly and logical / elegant as Dr. Chuck never fails to emphasize are some of the attributes of truly good codes. I did not ask a lot to help with the coding itself, but instead asked more to comment on their 'look', if you will. So - for those I never even once got any answer. I guess, she either never bothered to look because I did not shout out for help and they were marked 'passed' so why waste time? OR she did look, found them tolerable and was just unwilling to spare a couple of seconds to let me know that. For the two problematic ones there were those comments I mentioned that did not help a lot and I eventually got the Autograder to accept my versions on my own. I did my self-studying - and was ready for it in fact, since I taught myself a lot of things in life - but being a novice, I expected some feedback on presentability of my codes, on their being simple/logical/easy to debug in case I or someone else got to fix them later in real life - you get the idea. I wanted to know how user-friendly they were from a point of view of someone who has more knowledge of the area than me. I wrote a post asking why I am being disregarded in such a way and got lectured, I quote, that 'If a mentor has extra time, they will review your code and give feed back. Please do not post the same thing multiple times.' Mind you, I never posted THE SAME thing multiple times - there were single posts for EACH assignment - and I believe she considered my 'please, check my code' request for DIFFERENT assignments as repetitive, and that is not really qualified as repetitive because it was a NEW task EVERY TIME I posted this line - besides, how else should I ask a responsible person to check my work done? They ARE appointed to do just that and if one is annoyed by tons of people asking the same questions over and over again over the years, one should quit their job and not get annoyed by legit requests. Basta. How shameful, Ms Brunnock. Especially considering how much excellent work and effort into explaining and visualizing of concepts in Python Dr. Chuck had put. I have graduated and still not a single meaningful comment. Utterly disappointed but not put off. I will apply for the other courses in this specialization and hope to NOT encounter you again. Ms Mihaela Mak was LEAGUES better, I hope she will be there again further down the road.

This course is very useful

Well constructed progression through Data Structures in Python, good lectures and good exercises.

Great Course.

beautifully explained with elegant examples.

could always be updates