More frustrating than it is helpful. They skim over important topics like object-oriented programming and arrays and barely provide any helpful videos. Their assignments aren't difficult; they're just mind-numbingly annoying. The assignments give you a half-finished program and tell you to add specific methods in very specific ways. You're practically reading an instruction set and doing all the busywork without feeling like a programmer at all. This course won't teach you to think like a programmer, it'll just tell you to spend hours doing boring step-by-step tasks. None of the programs you're making feel like they're yours. Poor course all around, would skip.

I recommend skipping this course if you have done SOME programming before. This is a LONG course just to cover concepts of Array and hashes which really should be a one or two hour lecture. It is nice that you learn some beginner cryptography though. That said, some of the assignments were unnecessarily frustrating at times and a bit too long. While I think it is a good course. It wasn't right for me. A bit too basic and assignment too long for a subject matter I had a very low level of interest in.

I really don't understand why BlueJ is used, while there are lots of other free Java IDEs (Eclipse, IDEAJ, etc.)

Also i don't agree with some OOP things you say. I don't see any point in creating a separate class for each test case, one class for every single functional class is more than enough (e.g. we need to test a class called MyClass with 4 functions, thus we make no more than one test class with 4 or less (or more) test cases. Especially when you can use JUnit tests)

Very good content, however many of the assignments are not worded very clearly and can get confusing. They take much longer than the 10 minutes the course providers allocate and as such it can be easy to get behind on the course.

However, a very good course nonetheless.

nice course , programming assignments are simplified real world problems. that helps in getting familiar with other areas of applying CS in.

Quizzes and review questions are time consuming and boring, just collecting outputs from running your programming assignment.

More accessible than course two in the track. If you are a true newcomer to programming this course is also not a good choice for you unless you can spend much, much more than the projected time on the material each week.

It definitely makes you practice! But I hope it more dedicated to make us think how to use data structure more!! But If you are newbie to this field, it might be some challenging but help you to improve your coding!!

The concepts taught were very useful and interesting, but the only drawback I found with this course was the confusing nature of the Mini-Project.

videos are good and course is helpful. However, no staff working for forum, so if anyone has any problem, no staff is helping you.

Still needs some reconfiguration to the quizes. I am not satisfied with those. Needs to be fixed!

Course and Assignments were good, but don't hope for an answer in the discussion forums.

the reading part has many errors and unneccessary methods

Discussion forums for this course was not quite helpful.

OK, big improvement from first 2 in this series

Poor Quizzes and little help on the forum

Do not recommend this course and this specialization for beginners. Maybe worthy to make only if you have an experienced developer on your side to help you. Most likely, you're going to be really frustrated. Had high expectations on this courses, sadly was disappointed. Poor explanations, short videos, too complicated and multiple assignments, using BlueJ environment which nobody in a real world uses.

Again, I wish the teachers would explain explicitly what is needed for the programming exercise. I felt abandoned by the faculty when I was trying to work out the programming exercise. There is an assumption that we as students know what the teachers are talking about.

Too many weeks go by without feedback on forums.

it was very hard

The course was good for developing routine problem solving skills, as in the first course "Java Programming: Solving Problems with Software". However, the emphasis was supposed to be on Arrays, Lists and Structured data, and I do not think that was the case. These topics were mentioned tangentially to solving the class problems, rather than being the focus.

In summary, I could have learned as much about Arrays, Lists, and Structured Data in about 30 minutes of Googling as I did in 4 weeks of this course. However, it wasn't a total loss, as I became more proficient at the basics, simply because of the exercises.

it gets repetitive after week 2. it becomes unhelpful learning new concepts. I was expecting to learn more about important points of arrays and lists (such as erasing from an iterable, or null exceptions), than repeating similar practice for weeks.

Poorly designed and explained. You do not really gain much knowledge from this course.

I would not recommend my friends and basically others to take this course. There are far better courses out there for much cheaper prices.

Not really useful ~ I would like to email in a PDF of my comments covering this course and the second course in this series

I hated whit all my bones this one, boring, repetitive

Not useful content added for understanding