Ratings and Reviews for Python Project: Software Engineering and Image Manipulation

I agree with everyone else, this course is not related to the others on this specialization. The instructions and the material are not very clear and I read a lot comments of students asking questions and the instructors were replying in a 'annoyed' way and deleting parts of code of desperate students trying to finish the class...

The best way to learn is by thinking and doing! While reading the reviews of this course, I got discouraged to engage properly with the materials because of the opinions. That being said, if you are looking to learn by doing, this course is for you. It is a specialization project. It is not meant to be a walk in the park! Overall, I think it helps you think and actually forces you to code. If indeed you want to learn Python, it will help you a great deal! Don't take reviews saying it is difficult to heart. It is difficult but doable. All that you need to complete it have been covered. I wish you success!

The lectures were good and the examples were helpful. The assignments were very difficult compared to what was learned in the previous courses and in the final courses. It was a big jump from course 4 to course 5.

This course is a massive disappointment at the end of an otherwise high quality specialization. Unless you really feel that you must get the certificate for the full specialization, your time is better spent elsewhere. Bottom line, this course is bad enough that I will avoid taking anything from this instructor or using the Jupyter programming environment again. 1. The Jupyter programming environment used in this course is awful. The final project (90% of the course grade) takes literally hours to execute after your code is complete. Most of the time, the service will fail and require a restart before the code finishes. It doesn't matter if there are any errors in your code. Jupyter probably will time out before you can actually execute the entire program, even though your program won't be much more than 100 lines long. 2. The instructors could have helped this by choosing a better focus area, but instead, the course focuses on intensive image processing that uses a lot of memory and processing power. I'm not sure why they made this choice, but it doesn't work well for something that is required to be completed in an online environment. 3. This course is poorly designed. One of the main goals of this course, as listed in the introduction, is to teach students to use program documentation to build their own code. Unfortunately, the tesseract and opencv libraries (two of the three main libraries in the course) are not well documented - the instructor says as much during the course - and the student is effectively reliant on the instructor's background knowledge to make them work. I don't know why these specific libraries were chosen, but the experience would be better if they were changed to focus on something that could actually give the student independent experience. I could continue, but it would be more of the same. I have been very pleased with all of the other Python courses I've taken from the University of Michigan (10 courses in two specializations), but this one is nowhere close to the quality of the others.

About the course: The material is great and the topics are very interesting. But it has less to do with the rest of the "Python 3" specialization program. Courses 1-4 have the objective to teach you about Python language, how to solve software problems with Python, and to understand programming concepts like classes & objects. For someone who is starting with Python and never had learned concepts about image processing, this course could be somewhat overkilling. Image processing is usually more geared towards developers who want to get started with artificial intelligence or data science. There is another Michigan specialization in Coursera to accomplish that. I also think is somewhat difficult that a novice student could complete and understand the topics in this course in three weeks. This course requires, at least, five weeks and more homework, questionaries & examples.The lectures/videos mention a LOT of things (like Kraken) that are not required for the last project. I will repeat the first statement: the concepts are great, I loved the contents at some point, but this is not for everyone who is starting with Python. I think the University of Michigan is able to improve this course a lot. The Python 3 Michigan specialization is great overall. The firsts four courses are awesome, well structured, with an interactive tool as Runestone which helped me a lot to understand the problems to pass the assessments. This last course, the 5th one, has the main defect of lacking exercises. The Jupiter Notebook is not very useful to practice with Python, as Runestone was in the previous ones. I am sure all of this could be improved for this last course and obtain a better specialization program. EDIT: I forgot to mention that the teaching assistant in the Discussion Forums talks in a very rude way without any proper reason, as other students mentioned. This is a pity since many students have difficulty in accomplishing things that are not well explained in the lectures.

Great course! Final project had bugs in online component - better to download course content and run locally.

The project was pretty good. The course content was lacking and the teaching assistant was very rude and unhelpful. I plan to try the next Specialization, but if the first course isn't better I'll be looking elsewhere.

Excelent course

Gives good insight how to deal with images, to extract text and recognize faces.

If You want to learn OpenCV go with youtube tutorials