This course was not good at all. Almost all of the information is a screen scrape from a book and peer-evaluated, so you may be better off just getting the book and going through it. Neither the mentors nor the authors ever participated. The assignments are poorly written and missing too much detail. Ending up bailing on the course and the final capstone as I'm simply not learning anything and the projects are too frustrating to work on.

The course is just a dump of the recommended reading book. There are zero videos, zero walkthroughs and zero interaction with the instructors. The final project is over-demanding for the level of the content provided. I don't recommend this course to anyone.

Great course - learned a lot. Excellent instruction

One downside.. Peer review can be a blocking issue to moving forward. If no one is around to peer review, you wait, and pay while you wait.

I have been progressing through all the courses in this specialization and, overall, the courses have been of tremendous value to me. However, it's really not the courses themselves but the book that goes along with the courses that deserves the four and five star ratings I have previously given (these courses are really nothing more than "read the book" and "take the assignments"). Nevertheless, the knowledge gained is not easily available elsewhere. 80% of this visualization course (i.e. the book) was excellent and I give it top marks. The other 20%, starting with the grid system section to the end of the book, was terrible. These sections need a complete rewrite as they are barely comprehensible and certainly not comprehensive. The final assignment does not test you on how much you learned in the course, rather it tests you on how much time you spend on your own finding other relevant sources of information on the internet to figure it out. Also, I don't understand why creating a custom geom would be a more important software development skill than R Shiny for example, given that having the ability to develop interactive apps is critical to visualization. I will give this course 3 1/2 stars, rounded down to 3 since coursera won't allow a half star. I hope the authors take what I have to say as an opportunity for improvement since I have benefited tremendously from this specialization so far and I would like to see it improved in certain areas.

Great gap between teaching and what is required to pass the course. Unnecessarily difficult.

The didactic material is not compelling.

Not recommended.

I could plot in R before and many of the topics discussed in this course I already had a working grasp on. Still, the course helped me really gave me a whole new depth of knowledge on the packages that plotting is build around in R. Highly recommended!

Good material. Thanks a lot for this course.

Thank you very much for that lesson.

Last assignment is hard but enjoyed.

the last task is very challenging

Excellent course.

good challenges

A nice course

Great course

Nice

This course introduced to me the advanced capabilities of data visualization in R, especially using GGPLOT. It was bit of a struggle in the course project as the examples in the Mastering Software development e-book were little simplistic in nature. Overall, very satisfied that I can create my own geom. The key learning was on creating visualization using spatial data.

Like other courses in this mastering, it is a little bit outdated and the practical tests proposed are way harder than examples presented before, but still worth doing because of book, "getting hands dirty" and forum.

Great course! You'll learn a lot about the graphic capabilities of R. However, I think there are some things that need to be explained before one goes on to complete the final project.

It is a good course. The only downside is that if you are a beginner level R programmer and want to upskill, you will need to do an extensive search to complete this course.

It is a very good course, but feels a bit more hands-off than the other 3 preceding courses in the Mastering Software Development in R certificate.

very useful, especially the final practical exam.

not 5 score because I think more time should have been spent in more modern interactive charts

the course content is just copy from the book

nice course

I​ will put it like this, you will learn the ggplot2 package to a decent extent if you go all out reading the materials and learning the in betweens for the inner workings of the package (without cheating). You will learn a thing or two about the ggproto classes used to build all of the little geometries used to make those cool plots you've read about and how to use the stats, geometries, and grid layers to make your own graphics. This part of the R ecosystem (ggplot2 and grid) has a lot of missing parts that should be documented. For example, you'd think you could add ggproto classes together since that's how the ggplot2 syntax works, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. And this is just one of many little edge cases you learn through trial and error. You will lose your head trying to understand how ggplot2::layer and ggplot2::ggproto behave in the edge cases, but you'll learn a lot in the process.

I learned ggplot2 more than I think I ever wanted to. The book does a decent introduction to the graphics ecosystem for ggplot2, but it's not enough. Use browseVignettes("ggplot2") to assist you because the book is simply not enough to finish the last assignment. You'll get proficient at this graphics language, but this has less use than the other courses in this specialization. And grading is peer based, just to warn you, post your shareable link in the forums if you want a timely response for your certificate.

So first of all, the material for this course in the bookdown document are very good - well structured, with good sources. My concern is that the Coursera course does not go a lot beyond, basically just referring to the document and adding quizzes + graded assignment in the last week. The assignment, however, is nice and challenging and requires people to understand the materials.

Also, the course covers other great packages than ggplot2, e.g. plotly and leaflet and methods for handling spatial data. I think it would be very nice if the students were challenged in these topics as well and evaluate them in a better way than just a quiz (programming assignment for instance).

I liked the course though and I believe it can be prepared even better.