1

Pacing of this course was all over.

Interface and Abstract classes were introduced and the material and lessons were easy to follow. Sorting using bubble sort, caparable, and comparator operators were also easy to follow. The final week presented topics on exception and try/catch/finally, but provided no practical programs for a student to write to ensure the topics were understood.

The problem was in week 3. N-Grams meant to teach some very important concepts about Markov and predictive text, but failed somewhat since the quizes were not clear and the grading a bit harsh. In the quizes, problems were presented and you either had the right output or you did not. There was no checks available that allowed a student to figure out why code produced the wrong output. In other modules (and courses in this series), input was provided and expected out based on the input was provided to verify code was working correctly. Not in section 3 - you wrote the code, took the quiz, and if you got the answer wrong were left scratching your head as to why, since there were really no means to check.

Don't mistake this feedback as saying the course was bad - it was actually quite good. If the course material for week 3 is updated to include clearer instructions and some better checks to ensure code is working correctly then I will change my review from a four star (it's more 3.5 than 4) to a five star.

Nice course which logically ends the series of four. Finally explains why different duke.edu libraries were used as well as BlueJ, which seemed to be strange choise at the beginning. I've finally understood why interfaces and abstract classes are important and how to use it. I decrease the mark to 4 only due to week 3 tests unclarity around hashmap - I've never worked it out how to get to the test results on hashmap size - it was working fine on small samples, but not matching the answers which were in the quiz for the big files which took a lot of time from me and didn't bring satisfaction.

Generally, I like this course. The tasks are very interesting and require to spend some time on them. But what I don't like is IDE that teachers use in this course. I also think that whole week 3 should be redesigned, especially requirements, they are not very readable. You should add some testing utility or some cases to test and verify student output with teachers.

This course really increased the difficulty in Week 3 and gave poorly written instructions to go along with it. Overall, the course was very interesting and I learned a lot from it. Anyone who is interested in expanding their Java programming skills and write "neater" or "better code, this course is for you.

Great course in general, but some of the exercises / quizzes could be a bit more precise in what they are looking for. Lots of time debugging, lots of time in forums trying to figure out what was wrong, only to find that we were using the wrong project / class because it wasn't clear which one they required.

Decent. Moved kinda slowly, but it's for beginners, so what did I expect? This is a nice progression of classes for someone with no previous programming experience; if you have previous experience, in another language, you may wish to start with an intermediate course.

Good examples -- good basic instruction in videos, but most of the value is in working the exercises which use some fairly interesting real world scenarios. And some of the direction is as vague as specs you might encounter as well.

I could not get the Answers to the practice quiz of week 3

as my first line differed from the question first line.

the first two words were correct but the rest differed. MarkovWordOne.java

A very challenging course with a lot of assignments, great professors and discussion forum. But I feel like the instructors could have given the instructions more clearly on the assignment

i liked everything except some of the quizzes since some questions were unclear or wrong (but still, I was a beta tester, so all great) - thank you!

The third week was a great challenge and, while frustrating at times, gave me more to think about as I'm developing as a programmer.

The assignments get really cluttered sometimes and week 4's final quiz can certainly improve. Other than that, awesome course! :D

Good class and good education. My only objection is that some of the practice tests seemed unusually difficult.

not suitable for new beginners without any programming basis; teaching is good though.

the course material is really interesting , but it seems to be a little bit hard .

Nice job in getting complicated things simple ! Congrats to the Duke's team.

Very good course .. important for any wanna be programmer or beginner

You need to explain Exceptions and interfaces more deeply

The homework is too time consuming.

week 3 may need more explanation

The structure of the lectures as well as the assignments might need some redesign.

In the lecture, I think it might be better to explain the algorithm very clearly without talking about any coding details first, and then have some lectures explaining the code implementation. Right now, the coding implementation and the algorithm explainations are mixed together in a way that is not really easy to digest.

However, I really appreciate the solid content of this course. The markov assignment is a actual assignment copied from the CS201 course in Duke. Moreover, it is implemented with even a more sophisticated and better desiged structure. In the CS201, the concept of inheritance is not introduced yet. For all of you who made it to week03 assignment, you can applaud yourselves.

Sadly, the assignment design of this course is very disappointing. Despite its rich content, it requires the students to take a long time to adjust some details at some corner of the method to do the quiz question. It is very error prone and tedious. The final quizs need some simplification in the structure or format.

Overall, I still recommend people taking this course. Very Good content. Just be prepared for the assignment, it really needs a considerable amount of patience and efforts.

Overall, this course is pretty good and it helps to learn the basics of Java Interfaces. However, Week 3 was very confusing and discussion posts were not at all helpful in the forums. I am having a lot of trouble with the random text generator (assignment one) and I can not move on until I get that one method correctly. I was not able to understand the getRandomText() method, therefore it was very difficult to do MarkovFour. Especially, when MarkovOne was not even working. The readings had VERY confusing wording and I believe the grammar caused confusion. However, it could have been a typo. That is why I gave this specific course a 3 star rating.

This course was a content-overload when compared to the others. The coursework was a lot heavier and harder. But in the end it was all worth it. The only problem is that when you got stuck, the problem could be in many places since the guides did not give a chance test the code regularly as in the previous courses. Other than that, I can feel the improvement.

Despite having a strong engineering background, I found this course poorly communicated. The heavy use of technical jargon makes the concepts (which are intended to be simple) over complicated. The predictive text is interesting but simple exercises are needed to clearly teach abstraction and interfaces clearly.