Relatively basic course

good for beginners

Nice Course

good

There are a lot of errors in the videos (syntax of code) which made learning the syntax confusing. The instructions for the assignment were confusing at times and sometimes conflicted with the grading rubrics. For example the slice.go activity has lots of strange details (start with an "empty slice of length 3") which seems like a mistake (maybe capacity of 3?) which made coding and grading confusing. Another example is findian.go, one of the sample input is something like "I asd asd das ds N" which is very difficult to handle using fmt.Scan() for a new Go programmer which is the way of getting input taught in the lesson.. I feel like the instructor never went through i did the exercises following the instructions closely to experience these problems. Finally, in general the programming exercises need more details about expected inputs and expected outputs. Since we are grading peer's works, it make its hard when one peer expected one thing and other expected something else. i feel like im coding extra code to herd my grader toward my version of expected input to prevent them from giving me 0/10 just cuz i didnt follow THEIR expected inputs. The next version of this specialization series is better on details (though I still see errors in presentation video) but this first getting started course could need some improvements.

Many times the functions and packages provided by the theoretical videos were not enough to face the practical tasks, which forces you to search for content on the web (which you could have done without spending money on a course). Most of the more complex exercises are unclear in what to do and how your program should do it. Apart from this, the teacher was very clear in all his explanations and covered all the basics successfully. Perhaps my only criticism towards any of his classes is that when he spoke of some packages he did not mention how, or under what name it had to be imported (for example the json package), which led you to have to search on the web again. In conclusion, the only reason why I would pay for this course is to display the coursera diploma on my LinkedIn. All the contents given can be easily learned by doing research on your own.

This course serves as a decent introduction to Go, but while it does teach the basics, it does not sufficiently cover fundamentals of Go that should be present. Not enough time is given to various concepts, and you will need to do a fair amount of Googling to fill in the gaps required to finish each assessment. Assessments themselves are also poorly worded with confusing requirements which are often hardly relevant to the question.

Given that the course expects you to have some level of programming knowledge already, I would have expected that it would talk more about the quirks of Go that are different from other more common interpreted languages to familiarize you with the language. However, while many of these quirks are touched on, they are only briefly explained in a narrow context that can make it difficult to apply in general.

Course is OK, maybe best suitable for a lower-intermediate level. I understand some basic language concepts are presented in this course however if you have years of experience in any other high-level programming language you will likely finish this course in 3-4 days if you have a full time job (as I did...).

The multiple choice tests on 'what's the expected output from the snippet below' are horribly formatted meaning that you are compelled to copy/paste that in an text editor and format yourself the code snippet. I assume a simple markdown tag or even a screenshot (if you don't wanna people copying/pasting code snippets) would suffice, though.

Great lectures and presentations - really well done. Though more in-depth material could have been covered by providing information on various input and output (read/write) flavors. Not reading the go-doc and self-studying the go-methods in the libraries will not help to pass the exercises. It is still not clear to me how to build bigger projects with go. Examples would have been great. Excecies of week-3 was not clearly phrased to me. Multiple guesses and submissions were needed to pass. I failed on exercise in week-4.2 as my variable names were slightly off by one letter, but no comment was provided in the grading phase.

Some of the assessments (in week 4 about reading from a file) is extremely vague in its specification. The question quality in the quizzes is also uneven. And overall, rather considerable time is spent discussing various CS or programming languages fundamentals, even though the module says that it is assumed you're an experienced programmer. Oh, and there are various mistakes in the slides/lecture content too (though there's an errata). I wish more time was spent discussing various language nuances like ":=" and when redeclaration is permitted, than on generic CS concepts.

Instructor rambles at times, varying between assuming a lot of pre-knowledge and kindergarten level understanding. Contains some misconceptions due to instructor's youth. Examples not well worked, and in some cases WRONG - especially when discussion structures, syntax is annoying incorrect. Was able to follow along with examples in most cases. I'll probably complete series, but not looking forward to this instructor again. Met expectations with respect to "getting started".

I do like the videos, however they are basic, I'm aware that as an student I need to complement the videos with readings ( like official documentation) and additional studies, all of this in order to complete the assignments, however the assignment text is confusing, and lack of explanation, the level of difficulty of each assignments is to high comparing with the knowledge given in the module. For a course called Getting Started assume knowledge in Go that is not given.

The lessons format is not very useful. Instead of seeing the instructor talking and some basic data on the side we could be seeing an IDE and real-time coding.

Also, peer-graded assignments means that a working solution will have to be uploaded multiple times until someone reviews it correctly. Letting a program test it would be much better and allow for more complex assignments.

It´s a great course, weekly programs really help to understand, but will have to search for more information to make the program, so I think the course should include practical guides and videos explaining how to solve problems by coding instead of with a presentation. The slices are good, but I think that most time is better a video doing an example while explaining it.

Did not go as far as I had hoped. I think a better grounding in things like loops is more useful than going straight to JSON. Some editing on the videos to remove hesitations and self-corrections would improve the experience. A minor thing is that showing code with fancy formatting can give a wrong impression, e.g. that there are two types of double quote required.

The contents of the course are hardly useful to complete the assignments. The description of the final assignment was not clear enough. I was against peer review assignment at the beginning, but, I thought that this could be a good approach to the real world. However, a mix between peer reviews and automated tests could improve the course experience.

some of the tasks and their marking rubrics were wrong/unclear. for example, asking in read.go to have names as strings of lenght 20- obviously you cant do this directly, and if you wanted to enforce this you would need to do something like [20]rune and some annoying casting, which i doubt was the intention when writing this question

There is a decent explanation of some aspects, but:

1. This is a slide based course, no live coding whatsoever.

2. All tasks are peer-to-peer graded, so you will never know is it really a good solution.

3. Very few practical examples, all explanations are not deep.

The course was good as a beginner material for Golang. Although many of the slides during video lectures have error in the code displayed on the screen and that can be really frustrating at times when you try a code from the lecture and it gives you an error.

It will be sayed that the target are medium developers but very very basic will be repeated often. But the important thinks of golang like references will be handelt in 2min. There i would like to have some more examples and explainations.

Although the information the course provided was great, I found the content and the way of presentation less engaging. It would have been way better if only there were quizzes during lessons.

Instructor could have been better.Sometimes his explanations are vague and hard to understand,also this course needs to have some probelms which the instructor can explain in class

I prefer a course which has both, theory as well as coding lectures. This course only has theory lectures which I think is not enough. Overall lecture delivery was amazing.

Great explanations over all, but very theoretical in nature. Slides and presentations are fine for theory, but practical examples should be given with live coding videos.

Lecturer's explanation too vague even for intermediate listeners.

I wish there were actual coding exercises where the lecturer is solving at least one example problem.