Really not for beginners. Wish i would know this before engaging.

This course is definitely not for beginners.

Is NOT FOR BEGINNERS, WAS SO HARD.

not at all beginner friendly

:)

IF YOU ARE NEW TO PROGRAMMING DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE!!!!!

Although the course description states that it is suitable for Python beginners, I am here to tell you it is NOT. They make you jump over and back to Code Academy at first, which I found very annoying as the Code Academy lessons were great and doable, but by the time I came back over to Coursera I had forgotten what they were talking about in the course. The texts that make up the main parts of the course, explain the biology parts very well, but I found the programming parts to be very badly explained using complex language. I would read it over and over again and still have no idea what they were trying to say. Perhaps text isn't the best medium for this course.

The jump in difficulty in exercises from CodeAcademy to this course was also *insane*. Idk HOW they expect us to have enough knowledge and experience to complete those exercises simply from the beginner python 2 course. It's just ridiculous. The comments are full of people complaining about the difficulty and others providing solutions. If it weren't for the comments I would not have finished this course.

Also a lot of the exercises, especially in unit three and four, require you to copy and paste a lot of the functions you've already written to use as subroutines. This becomes intensely frustrating trying to click back through your previous exercises to find them, or else you have to start keeping a document with all your functions in it to copy and paste.

I also disliked how they did not provide any hints if you got it wrong. Yes, I understand that's how debugging code works, it can be tedious and frustrating, etc, but for a so-called "beginner" course I think they should have provided some hint or maybe highlighted what you were getting wrong after a few attempts. It is very disheartening to get it wrong over and over with no offers of help and no idea how you can fix it.

***

In summary I feel like this course would be great for programmers who want to get into bioinformatics. I think it would be very compelling and interesting then, but for biologists, it makes you want to pull out your hair in frustration. I appreciate that it is a free course and definitely a lot of time went into making it from the creators, but if you're a beginner at Python like me, I would *highly* recommend you to take a different course, or become very comfortable with Python before taking it.

It is telling that the vast majority of 5-star ratings seem to come from people with a background in programming. For those of without any programming knowledge, the sink or swim format of this course is unhelpful.

I think I would have learned a lot if the logic of the correct answers to the programming questions had been explained more clearly, if at all. Looking at answers of other students, I often saw syntax that had not been introduced in the course yet. I had to unenroll because this was supposed to be just for fun for me and it was just a headache.

This course was supposed to be for beginners, but I found that this is not the case at all. I had to spend about 10 hours a week for about four months outside of the course using other resources to actually be able to complete it. The fact that each question in the interactive learner does not show the full code is extremely limiting and frustrating for people completely new to learning to code. I would not recommend this course to others as a result.

As a biologist, I find this course way more avanced than for beginners.

The Codecademy links provided are useful and do teach the basics of programming, however the Stepik tasks associated are far beyond what's explained on Codecademy, giving me the impression that to be able to pass this course you need to have a basics on programming more than on biology.

Mad respect to the biologists that are able to finish this course without going crazy.

Please be warned: You really need to know how Python works before taking this class. The suggested time frames for completion are absolutely insane for a true beginner. Week 1 suggests 4 hours, I'm a totall coding newbie and I've already spent at least 8 hours in Codecademy, which does not translate well to the Stepik tool. Guess I'll be eating this $49.

This course is mislabeled as being for beginners, and the time investment is way too large. As a biologist, it takes way too much of my time doing the Codecademy lessons and then the lessons in Stepik, which are poorly structured.

Terrible el curso, mucha información está mal, loe ejercicios pesimamente explicados. Si sabes copiar y pegar puedes hacer el curso.

No lo recomiendo para nada, es una pérdida de tiempo, todo mal hecho. un asco de curso.

This course is never ever for Beginners of Python. Very poor didactics. The explanations are very short. If you want be totally discouraged of programming, you should do this course. It's really bad teaching.

This course is definitely not for beginners. It takes too much more time than it mentions and fails to guide beginners in the bioinformatics field properly. Would not recommend it at all.

This course is terrible, it's poorly explained and it's by no means for beginners, a lie, I can't find a way to quit this course but if I knew I would do it immediately.

I cannot learn and continue this course as I have little experience of programming, therefore, I find it difficult and too challenging .

The course is surely not for beginners and it takes a lot more time than 4 hours a week.

it is not for beginners i'm a beginner and it's really hard to keep up with the course

Not for beginners and the output window is badly programmed.

I am a beginner and this is very difficult to understand.

Too tough for someone who does not know programming.

This course is absolutely terrible for begginers

This course is not at all beginner level.

Is very difficult for biggeners

definitely not for beginners