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Learner Reviews & Feedback for The Data Scientist’s Toolbox by Johns Hopkins University

4.6
stars
33,829 ratings

About the Course

In this course you will get an introduction to the main tools and ideas in the data scientist's toolbox. The course gives an overview of the data, questions, and tools that data analysts and data scientists work with. There are two components to this course. The first is a conceptual introduction to the ideas behind turning data into actionable knowledge. The second is a practical introduction to the tools that will be used in the program like version control, markdown, git, GitHub, R, and RStudio....
Highlights
Foundational tools

(243 Reviews)

Introductory course

(1056 Reviews)

Top reviews

LR

Sep 7, 2017

It was really insightful, coming from knowing almost nothing about statistics or experimental design, it was easy to understand while not feeling shallow. Just the right amount of information density.

SF

Apr 14, 2020

As a business student from Bangladesh who is aspiring to be a data analyst in near future, I love this course very much. The quizzes and assessments were the places to check how much I exactly learnt.

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4826 - 4850 of 7,122 Reviews for The Data Scientist’s Toolbox

By Jason D

Apr 8, 2020

I would have preferred more hands-on examples or projects for each week's lessons. As an entry-level practioner, this course felt thin. There is a lot to absorb and while my interest and curiosity is peaked, I've found I've been able to grasp a better understanding of the material outside the classroom rather than inside. This is ultimately a good thing but I would have liked some more "hand-holding" from the course to feel more comfortable moving forward

By Cibele S

May 23, 2023

I liked the course the link is great between R and Git, it was extremely important. The explanation is gradual in some chapters, but in others it advances and does not show how it would be when making some modifications. I think it would be nice to be as specific as possible, so we don't waste time with simple questions/actions. There were also some test questions that don't appear in the videos or written material, it would be nice to highlight them!

By Prottay H

Feb 3, 2020

Great intro course. Got me in the mood, established the perspective I should have going in. I felt that some of the lessons like R Markdown were a bit rushed and at times I felt like I was just following along without understanding the commands and ideas. Perhaps that is simply a lack of emphasis or a lenience in tone (like don't worry, we'll look at this later), but in that case I suppose it did not translate through the synthesized speech.

By Eva-Christin S

Feb 18, 2021

Great course and content overall. I understand why Amazon Polly was used for the course. However, it is difficult for me to focus on learning from a robot voice. I prefer a course lecture to be done by a real person. Again, just a personal preference, and it didn't take away too much from the learning experience since it's an introductory course. I am excited that the next course in the specialization does not use Polly though.

By Saquib C

Sep 1, 2020

Although the modules were supposed to teach us how to setup RStudio and git on our computer, I found that they ignored a lot of common errors. I use a Mac and had to spend a lot of time on the web looking for answers to how to complete the setup. Although the solutions were pretty straightforward, it took me a long time to identify and pick the right solutions, the right downloads and the right tweaks to get everything going.

By JONATHAN R W I

Jan 21, 2021

It's a good course but there are some things that can be improved. Sometimes the quizzes asked things not mentioned in the lecture. This is confusing for some of the students. I get it, we are supposed to try things out in Rstudio ourselves. Nevertheless i still think that the right course of action is to make the course material more detailed and thorough. Just give us all the explanation, don't leave some things hanging.

By Tyler v B

Mar 13, 2023

This course taught a great deal about setting up the environment needed for the course, but glossed over fundamental aspects trivial to good data science. I think incorporating more questions around the why around data science would've been good to incorporate as an extra week in the course. Nonetheless, it taught a lot of good fundamental aspects of data science, and how to begin approaching the way we think about data.

By Dariusz S

Nov 12, 2017

It's a very introductory course where topics are only mildly touched upon but I guess this is the goal of it. Git, GitHub, R, RStudio, Statistics... these are only signalized and very basic introduction is given. I trust that the other courses that constitute the whole Data Science Specialization series will dive deeper into the individual subjects. But as an introductory course The Data Scientist's Toolbox is OK.

By Luis F d R X

Jun 24, 2017

This is an introductory course to the vast theme of Data Science. Fundamental concepts in data science are given and also the access to the most commonly used tools is showned, as its name suggests. You'll learn which questions to ask and how to answer them. You will setup your data science lab in your pc (R Studio) and join the development community using GitHub. An entry-level well paced intro course. Very Nice.

By Abhijna R

Jan 5, 2017

The narration and content are excellent. The clarity of the slides has given neat direction steps to installing the software. However, I was not able to co relate the Command Line Interface with the R console after installation. I was overwhelmed with the huge list of commands immediately after software installation. The Week 3 videos have great information but lacks a coherence with the remaining course content.

By Andreas D

Nov 17, 2020

I loved what I learned in the course and I'm convinced that it wiull help me foward my career. I'm giving it only four stars though because of the impersonal robotic-voice videos. I have read your arguments in favour of it, and I'm aware of your limitations, but even though that there are real people behind the voice, I miss a face and a modulated voice and probably even glitches and slips and 'umms' and 'ahs'.

By Harrison K

May 27, 2017

This course was a very good broad overview of what data science is. I've taken some courses tangential to the topic before, so it wasn't particularly groundbreaking. I encountered some complications installing software and didn't feel like it was always very clear what order I was supposed to do things in, and I wished I'd had more help since installation issues can crop up much later and be hard to diagnose.

By William H

May 19, 2020

The text to voice simulation needs work. In particular, it does not understand that when the word "record" is used as a noun, the accent is on the first syllable. When it is used as a verb, the accent is on the second. Also, to output markdown files to pdf, on Windows machines, one needs MikTex and to link it to R Studio. I have downloaded MikTex, but I have not yet figured out how to link it to R Studio.

By Benjamas T

Jun 3, 2020

The content of the course is very detailed, including a step-by-step guide which really supports beginner as the course promoted. The pace of the course is just right. The only comment here is that, while I understand the underlying reason, the course is presented using a text-to-speech voice which makes the course sleep inducing. Overall, it is a good starting point for those who want to learn R without a

By Eddie T

Jun 4, 2017

I like the structure of this course, it introduces essential tools for people who just begin the journey of becoming a programmer. But the quality of videos needs to be improved, especially the instructor is basically reading the slides and sometimes it's distractive and boring... Besides, I don't think it's necessary to include all the introduction sessions for other courses in this specialization.

By Deleted A

Nov 19, 2020

This was a very good introduction, although IO found some of the technical requirements difficult to understand. The AI voice takes a bit of getting used to; just understand that words will be mispronounced periodically. That is not enough to cause any big problems. Hands on practice is the key to get you through. Because this course is a foundation, it goes without saying that you must practice.

By James J

Dec 26, 2016

Are you ever tired of long-winded professors, focusing on a lecture for an hour or more, or spending hundreds of dollars for a class? Well, this course gives you the structure of a course, but the video lectures are concise, the topic is to get you in the door for data science, and all of my questions were answered quickly. I recommend this course to anyone who wants to learn data science.

By Yean D

May 25, 2020

Great Course. But for completely beginner who don't have any previous experience in programming or have some experience in other language but not in R Programming Language, might find it difficult to cope with. Many of the times, I had to google and watch other tutorials in youtube to understand some lessons of the course. Besides the artificial robotic voice was quite irritating for me.

By Danish N T

Jun 19, 2020

I get that this course is more catered towards people who have never set u Softwares like Matlab and Rstudio and have never utilized Git but I felt that if you are touching these topics, it would be better if it were more in-depth and made a strong foundation. The statistics part of the course was excellent but I felt more attention could be paid towards Git and Bash and CLI in general.

By José L P m

Nov 24, 2020

I started with zero knowledge about data science and now I have learn about I practiced the basic tools that can be used for any data processing and presentation job.

Duration and deepnest of material is ok and I could learn at my pace while having additional documentation in case I need more deep knowledge of the tools and techniques.

I plan to continue with other Data Science courses.

By Victor K

Nov 7, 2018

Good introduction to the Data Science Toolbox. I found the course very engaging, setting up foundation for further studies. Also, very nice platform supporting In my mind though taking this course makes sense only in conjunction with the other courses within this Data Science Specialisation as knowledge you get from Data Science Toolbox will not be sufficient for practical application.

By Oleksii P

Nov 22, 2016

This is my first course on Coursera so i didn't really know what to expect and i apologise in advance for my ignorance. The course only takes you 8-10 hours or so to complete (even accounting for reading external sources) spread across a month. I enjoyed it, but it doesn't feel like i learned a lot and i think it could be a bit more intensive. Looking forward to R Programming (part 2)

By Martin M

Mar 11, 2017

With my background, this was a lot of repetition of information that I already knew, but I was happy to have the reminder and it would be an excellent introduction to the specialization for others who do not have as much of a data science/computer science background. Overall, I feel that the course was worth my time and I feel it is a great start to the Data Science Specialization.

By Hong C

Jun 29, 2020

It is really a long journey to me ( 6 months) and the study itself has ups and downs. The first few courses and last few course are relatively easy to me, but the statistics reference and regression model are really hard, and Capstone is the most difficult and time consuming course/project ever. I am glad it is all over and pretty sure it will be worth the time and effort on it.

By Jen V

Oct 8, 2019

I found it somewhat difficult to figure out how to push the file to GitHub (luckily I did find some helpful info in the forums), but otherwise found most of this course very easy. I can't figure out how to download the slides in such a way that allows me to click on hyperlinks, and I've seen other people say the same thing. I also would recommend making the code & graphs bigger.