Ratings and Reviews for Using Databases with Python

It's an excellent course. Thanks for the oportunity to learn. Thanks to Coursera, to the University of Michigan and of course to Dr. Chuck, a very good an enthusiastic teacher! All the best for you!

Good course.

great instructor with great course and material , i have learned about database and used sqlite as a DBMS learned the primary query and stored data from xml and json into my local DB

Excellent rendition and accessible content

As an experienced programmer, I am unimpressed. The assignments cover a good set of tools; classes and databases. I would have introduced classes much earlier to emphasize critical coding habits of productive programmers: modularity and reusability. Unfortunately, classes seem to be included here as an afterthought. They are introduced in week 1 and never seen again. Inheritance is mentioned but not explored and an important documentation feature is ignored. The lectures extoll the wonder of SQL but don't even mention outer joins. In later examples, databses are used to house data; but that data is extracted to Python variables with simple queries, where it is manipulated with Python. Programming exercises consist of running his poorly written code and posting results for peer review; students are instructed to grade leniently. Overall, the presentation looks rushed and unpolished. Example code looks like it was hobbled together until it worked and never edited for clarity. If someone I cared about wanted examples of good programming, I would tell them to avoid this.

Excellent, tho hard with the sample. sort of misleading with the following exercises

Note: I'm rating this course as an element of the Python for Everyone Specialization. This course is well done technically and Severance is a great teacher, but I don't know what they were thinking when deciding to have students who have only just recently gained a most tenuous grasp of Python start to work with databases. If a student began this as a true beginner, s/he is still just a fledgling pythonista by the time he's being completely overwhelmed by all this other new stuff. I found that when JSON, XML, and SQL were introduced, my comprehension of "what's going on" decreased from around 95% to 15%. My eyes just glazed over when looking at the code and I completed assignments by tinkering around and praying that they would work.

I would like to thank dr. Chuck and his team! Especially those people who worked behind the scene. You are the heroes of our days bringing free education to community. Respect.

I'd rather program more than just be a user

I have been enjoying my journey through these courses by Dr. Chuck immensely. My only criticism is that sometimes the instructions for an assignment are a bit odd in wording, counter intuitive, even unclear. This issue may be more true of the previous course than this one. But the remedy if confused is the active and helpful forums. The mentors and teaching assistants are amazing, and often make pinned posts to guide students over hurdles, such as with the final assignment of this course and a problem with Google's API key. Still, the set-up, the skills learned, and most of all Dr. Chuck's engaging, easy to understand, and humorous lectures are well worth the time and price of admission.