The potential of the course material is great. it certainly expose the student to a range of topics.

The potential of the course is reduced significantly however by the labs. They have poor specifications and leave the student to 'discover' how to complete labs. In the early labs it's just a cut and paste to make things work, but in the later labs its the lack of objective specifications that makes them difficult ....not the material covered.

The capstone lab in particular is a reasonable challenge in itself, but made incredibly more challenging (read, it requires multiple attempts just to find out what is required in the answer) because of the lack of specification.

Do I think it's a worthwhile course? Yes, because it makes you think through a learning path.

Do I think it's a good course? Not so much since the learning objectives are very much left to the student to discover almost by accident.

the labs are sometimes frustrating because it does not give you feedback on what you are doing wrong. it just says you did not pass. it may take hours before you figure that small thing.

Disappointed as this did not meet my expectations as a Google Company backed course. This would have been great as a free course by a first time teacher. But for a course backed by a great company this did not meet what I expected. It was sloppy really. First the instructor made a series of political statements unrelated to learning Python. Second the instructor would not stop making really childish puns. Both of these things were unnecessary and not what I expected from a professional course. Worse the labs were really terrible and I felt that they were not proof read by folks at Google. Another frustration is the videos are almost 100% showing the instructor talking. They only flash the code very briefly on the screen meaning you will be pausing and rewinding the videos consistently just to see the sample code long enough to read it. In the end the course met the syllabus but not up to the Google name and not worth the price I paid compared to other free learning out there.

The final assignment is way too hard because there's not enough time to do the three exercises and write the actual code for the graded part. In addition there's only 5 points so it's basically pass or fail. Also the dictionary sorting code they provide you will not work unless you're copying to a new dictionary (which they don't explain to you). Oh and you have to encase the sorted statement in a dict() function for that, which they don't tell you. I ended up not using the operator module at all and just doing the sort when outputting to csv. Oh and if you write the code for the exercise perfectly and are not getting any points it's because you have to do the creation and conversion of the user_emails.csv in exercise 2 so you can't skip that.

In starting five weeks , all answers were directly provided and week 6 and 7 were very tough. So i suggest to equalize the toughness level in all weeks ,ie, no direct spoon feed nor abrupt toughness

Not for beginners too complicated too costly

May be the worst instructor in the google

Week 2 of this course is pretty bad. The difficulty increases dramatically for topics that could be explained better. This was the first week where I learned more from the forums than I did from the course material. Then the Practice Quiz for Reading & Writing CSV Files seems to always return an error of 'Something went wrong! Contact Coursera Support about this question!" which results in a failure for the quiz. It appears that this has been an issue for a while but has not been resolved and contacting Coursera Support isn't very straightforward.

I was honestly enjoying this program until week 2 of this course. Please do better.

Final project is too hard for things learned in the course and the platform uses different python version from what we learned.

Disappointment! Course is abandoned by its authors.

Essence of the lab help is in the excerpt below, taken from the Discussion Forum.

"...the support guy from QwikLabs just gave me his solution code and asked to replace the username with mine. This is the code, posting here for reference [NOT MINE]."

What is the point of this certificate?

Forum moderators have only one answer: "here is a correct code for this task".

Labs 1-6 are simply copy/paste. The code you are supposed to write is given at the bottom of the page.

Students (apparently proud of their achievement) post the code that let them complete an assignment. Code is lame and frequently contains multiple errors. Why? One of the reasons is in the dialog below:

= May I ask how did you copy the code out from the VM?

= Line by line my friend, i wrote it all again.

Well, here comes the hint: use WinSCP or scp.

I am going through another Python course (not from Google) and believe me it takes time and effort to come up with a working code. Guys have a Telegram canal to support. Any posts from students that contain a hint are deleted. Suggested solution (from instructors) is revealed only when the test is passed. This is there you see how lame your code is and how elegant it should be.

Google course is very far from that.

This course touches upon a lot of topics. It covers them in breadth rather than depth. I experienced a huge transition coming from the previous course, Crash Course on Python, in terms of difficulty. It covers so many topics that at times, I felt confused about understanding the interconnection between them.

Regular Expressions was explained best, wherein elaborate explanations were provided. The week on Automating Testing Using Python felt a bit rushed.

A major downside of this course is the Qwiklabs platform, which is also its major upside (we don't need to install any software locally to navigate through the course). However, there are discrepancies in the lab instructions and how the grader evaluates your submission on Qwiklabs. In week 7, I wasted 2 days on Qwiklabs with multiple interactions with the Qwiklabs Customer Support.

Overall, I would recommend this course.

Most labs were just copy and paste exercises. Final project didn't have enough feedback from Qwiklabs to troubleshoot -- there was one checkpoint that basically said "Something is wrong". Finishing required copy/pasting data into a .csv file that is used nowhere else in the rest of the project.

I struggled a little but enjoyed it a lot. Learned a lot of new things and also some of the courses are quite confusing and challenging to learn.But good knowledge to learn.

I'm really appreciated from Google for providing this course and really appreciated the course instructor "Roger" he is very cool guy, and after all i want to thank Course era organization which gives the chance for learners who want to gain success.

This course covers most of general concepts of automation, testing, regular expressions, and much more. Personally I will use these skills everyday because I deal with log files and this course helped me to actually work with them efficiently. Thanks Google

Definitely a course you need to take. Not easy but that's the point, depending on your knowledge you might start slow on the first lessons but at the end you'll be amaze on how natural you code.

This course I particularly enjoyed more. It was very relevant and hand on. I know with Google's authority now how to make the computer do my bidding. Thank you all for this course.

On last lab server isn't updated yet. The error is kind of frustrating.

Overall you need to move labs to your PC to have more time.

Taught me alot about using regex pattern recognition, although I still recommend books and external source as a suppliment. There will be frustrations like regex only takes in string, I figured a long time why a tuple won't work etc.

It took me about 12 hours to finish the last lab.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52404656/sre-sre-match-object-is-not-subscriptable

I wasted to much time for research, I want to spend time learning right now, not researching by myself

Lots of blabla ...not straight to the point...boring

This is the second course in the Python Automation sequence, and I highly recommend it as a stand-alone introduction to using regex, python and bash scripting for log analysis and other automation jobs. The course feels like it was built with a clear list of skills it wanted students to come away with. Thank you! This structure was evident in how each module, lecture, and exercise was integrated into a learning whole, IMO. I never felt like I had been shipped out to tackle gotcha problems I was at a loss to know how to even start, as is my still-strong memory of introductory Course #1. Here in Course #2 each module's purpose made sense, and the assignments reinforced the student learning objectives. Often the assignments were very thoughtfully constructed so that you had to show mastery of not only the main concepts but the next-level deep of learning too.

I spent 2-3 weeks at the end on the final 7th week problem of parsing a log file. It was a real-world example I absolutely wanted to be able to implement later on my own. This final problem was an opportunity for me to pause in the course and self-assess what areas I really didn't know well enough, even as a beginner. So, I spent time reviewing basic things like data structures, regex, and object oriented programming fundamentals. Even then, I benefited from the student Forum discussions around this final problem, and really appreciate some of the clearly talented folks who share tips for making it over speed-bumps. I'm glad I took this pause to go deeper on basics, and may integrate this into my learning schedule for future courses. There is just so much to learn, and it pays to tolerate the confusion of forging ahead as well as being sure to circle back and reinforce fundamentals when you are ready to look again at a basic topic.

The instructor was great: knowledgable, encouraging that you could do the work assigned, and again, comfortable steering the ship with purpose. A real education leader.

There is a lot of useful information in this module and not only did I apply what I learned in Python from this module and the previous one, but I also learned some basics of Linux commands. Although I've been in the I.T. industry for years now, I haven't done programming in recent years. So I got sweaty palms when I was doing the final project. I did not sleep the night until I got it done. 🤣It went well that I followed Roger's advice to do it first outside of the lab because I get to explore my plan of action and think it through. 🏆 Lastly, I don't mind the in-between jokes at all. 😁

It was a great experience. All the material was new to me, i enjoy specially the linux commands: feel like had have superpowers! And i hae much to learn about unitest, bash scripting and read/write files, etc. But this was a perfect start to do that. Thanks Coursera Team!

An advice; there's an issue with Practice Quiz "Reading and Write csv files" on the week 2. A lot of student had has de same problem with the first question: it get an error, and the team support never could solve, so it will great if they can pay attention to this things.

Great course! I had some previous knowledge, but this was perfect to fill in the gaps. Also, unit testing was completely new to me and will be very useful in future projects. Thanks for making this!

The course really came together in weeks six and seven, but the reading materials in weeks 1-5 were lackluster, containing one or two links without context, pointing to a narrow topic of that week.

Coursera is one of the best online learning platform. From this course I studied lot about Python programming and how to use it for OS level operations. Thank you, Coursera