Good

good

good

Good

nice

nice

nice

good

Good

Good

Good

nice

NIce

good

good

nice

god

NA

NA

ok

.

While the other courses have been pretty good, albeit maybe a bit on the simplistic side, this course was definitely the weakest so far in the Python 3 Specialization. I thought the coverage of classes and object-oriented programming (OOP) was not all that great. I have a background in C++/C# so thankfully I already have a solid understanding of OOP, because otherwise I don't think I would have gained much real-world understanding from this course. While it shows you the basics of how to create classes and inherit from other classes, it's very light on how the OOP paradigm is intended to be used. There's very little to no discussion of the core aspects of Abstraction and Polymorphism which are absolutely essential to using it properly.

These courses would have better done with examples that build upon each other, rather than isolated one-off examples each time. That way students can gradually see how different aspects of the language combine with each other to result in larger, more complex programs. That is even more the case in this course. You go from a bunch of tiny, isolated examples to a whopping 250 line final project that is orders of magnitude more complicated than anything else encountered previously in the Specialization. For someone totally new to programming this must have been extremely intimidating. The code in the final project should have been distributed throughout the course in examples building up to it rather than hitting you with it all at once.

A couple other nitpicks. First, there is an awkward and out-of-place 30 minute segue into the Django web development framework which, in my opinion, contributed very little understanding to the concepts of classes and OOP. Second, the instructors created a custom implementation only available on their online textbook to demonstrate unit testing. Python already has built-in assertion functionality for testing, so I don't understand why that was not used in favor of something students won't even be able to use in an actual Python environment.

The lectures and text material about Exceptions are very good.

The lectures and text material about Testing together are too brief. I have read enough about Python to know that Python has a module called Unitest. Unitest deserves a separate week or more than one week, perhaps another course.

The introduction to Classes is good, but the lectures and text material about Inheritance are too shallow. I never really understood how inheritance is to be applied.

I found that the course material did not prepare me to work on the final project. I completed reading all the text, the lectures and the assignments during the first three week. Then I extended the deadlines by one month, and I consider myself fortunate to have finished the course during those extra four weeks.

I liked the course, as i did all the past three courses in this specialization so far. That being said, I think this course seemed a little more rushed compared to the others, which might be the Book's shortcoming and not the course's. I know they tried to keep the explanation and depth in this course somehow relatively basic, but i think, because classes and inheritance are some of the most essential and tricky topics, they could've spent more time on them. All in all, however, this was an excellent course, and i appreciate all of the hard work by all the professor's and staff.