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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Java Programming: Solving Problems with Software by Duke University

4.6
stars
7,850 ratings

About the Course

Learn to code in Java and improve your programming and problem-solving skills. You will learn to design algorithms as well as develop and debug programs. Using custom open-source classes, you will write programs that access and transform images, websites, and other types of data. At the end of the course you will build a program that determines the popularity of different baby names in the US over time by analyzing comma separated value (CSV) files. After completing this course you will be able to: 1. Edit, compile, and run a Java program; 2. Use conditionals and loops in a Java program; 3. Use Java API documentation in writing programs. 4. Debug a Java program using the scientific method; 5. Write a Java method to solve a specific problem; 6. Develop a set of test cases as part of developing a program; 7. Create a class with multiple methods that work together to solve a problem; and 8. Use divide-and-conquer design techniques for a program that uses multiple methods....

Top reviews

FA

Oct 7, 2017

Excellent explanations and amount of course work for practice, the tests made good use of the examples and work given, I am satisfied with what I learned in this course and see it's real world usage.

AS

Dec 10, 2020

Excellent explanations and amount of course work for practice, the tests made good use of the examples and work given, I am satisfied with what I learned in this course and see it's real world usage.

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1526 - 1550 of 1,613 Reviews for Java Programming: Solving Problems with Software

By Felicia K

Oct 27, 2015

Could not get through the first week. Way too much emphasis on BlueJ and Duke University specific libraries. I I already have a decent foundation in coding and took the course with the idea I could get a refresher on Java. If your a beginner there are way better courses out there. This course is all over the place and I could see it being confusing for someone just picking up programming.

By Arseniy M

Aug 10, 2020

Very hard. Not much help and poor explanation. Every professor uses their own little tricks and methods so the material does not flow well together. It seems like they assume that you remember every single concept from the start and don't give any useful tips on how to proceed about the learning experiences. This ended up taking way more time than it said on the schedule.

By José F G C

Jun 10, 2020

In an online course you cannot expect us to learn only by the practise without a little of theory. In the assigments you incorporated things we didn't know and you explained a few there but it is not enough. Here we don't have a regular following like in a real course so we have to learn everything by the theory and only put in practise that we learnt there.

By Rick P

Oct 25, 2017

The data set in the genome studies was too large for mine - and judging by the forums - others computers memory to compile. Which made some of the exercises/tests very difficult to complete. Also, a few of the tests seemed to have at best unclear questions and at worst plain wrong. &-:

By Manoj S

Feb 22, 2023

Make to solve the problem with their own in-built modules which makes the creativity of learner limited to some fixed logic's rather than just letting them to develop logic's freely through any kind of java compiler.

By asmida n

Sep 26, 2020

I actually enrolled for this course with a intension to learn java programming from the basis.But i dont get the concept of class,interface,oop etc.this course help me to write the simple program.

By HEMANTH Y

Feb 19, 2020

I'm unable to understand the tutor language... I feel like they are going fast and I'm unable to catch them.

sorry and I don't want to continue this course anymore.

By Soumyamoy D

Jul 1, 2020

It would be better if Java was taught from the scratch with syntax and semantics, instead of using BlueJ and external packages at the first instant only.

By Antonio B R

Sep 13, 2020

Way too repetitive. It gets extremely boring doing basically the same tasks with Strings over and over and over and over again. And then some more.

By Jerrold

Oct 7, 2020

Fantastic course. Great assignments and lectures. Low score because the workload is excessively high and overwhelming for novice programmers

By Shachi P

Aug 22, 2016

This course is really hard, and I am having ALOT trouble understanding it. Overall, it is not one of the best courses I have taken.

By Camino E

Sep 4, 2023

Hard to understand, poorly explained concepts, own-class oriented, a big deception and a waste of time and money.

By CW C

Mar 29, 2020

Not a very good course for Java. The introduction in week 1 is taught roughly.

By y C

Mar 10, 2019

I do not think it is helpful enough.

It just tells lots of basic things.

By Ng W L

Jul 24, 2020

hard to get help, its not very beginner friendly..

By Farhan H P

Aug 15, 2020

This Course does not cover the Java Basics at all

By Adelajda K

Dec 3, 2020

The lessons are not easy to catch for a beginner

By Sireesha C

Oct 4, 2020

Videos are not okay. Could be more explanatory.

By Yonas S

Jan 28, 2023

nobody to help with IDE problems!

By Arogya D

Jun 5, 2023

vrey poorly made

By Mackmin M

Sep 15, 2021

Very challenging

By Richard C

Sep 22, 2022

I really want to know if the people giving this course glowing reviews are real people that have taken other programming courses on Coursera. I've done a bunch, and this may be the worst one that I've seen. It's definitely not accessible to beginners. If you can't already program well in another language, this will be unintelligible to you.

The lectures are super easy to follow because they are written like they were designed for audiences of small children. As soon as you go and try to do the assignments, you'll notice that they are very difficult and that watching the videos (even multiple times) does nothing to prepare you for what you are doing. Even the first exercise is brutally hard if you don't already know what you are doing with respect to object oriented programmings patterns. They give you a big file with some prewritten functions and then expect you to be able to write several functions to solve increasingly more complex problems based on the methods from their custom class. There's a very good chance that you'll look at it and just stare blankly because nothing prepares you for what you are expected to do.

The big issue that I can't get over is that although I can sort of stumble my way through things, I don't feel like the course explains how and why things work the way that they do. Why am I doing [insert whatever task]? I have no idea really.

When you realize that you have no idea what is going on, you'll go into the forum and notice that every question you have has been asked by multiple people already, often going back several years. It's obvious that nobody maintains or looks at these discussion forums.

Everyone else has pointed it out, but it's worth saying again: BlueJ is terrible. Why one earth would you force people to use an IDE that nobody else uses? Being forced to use BlueJ alone is a reason to not finish this course. Just don't do it--it's awful.

I also think it's terrible to write custom classes for a course and then make the course completely dependent on them. Why do courses do this? It literally makes most of what we are doing useless outside of the class.

By Jessecca S

Nov 29, 2021

This corse was horrible. I tried very hard for a few months to grasp the concepts and learn at the pace that was required. However, even with a small amount of programming experience, these courses made little to no sense. Also, the duration of the courses was WAY off, I work a full time job, so I was excited about taking this class in my free time after work and for an hour or two on the weekends. However, I found that I had to set aside at least 3-4 hours EACH DAY to accomplish the tasks and try to squeeze information out of instructional videos that just wasn't there. The instructors overcomplicate topics, while speaking in a tone as if they are talking to children. Some of the information that was mentioned I could not find anywhere else online, so I was stuck trying to take notes from the readings and videos, only to get to the quiz and NOTHING lines up with what was taught. They attempt to teach you from the ground up, however, they jump around from topic to topic to where it's impossible to feel like you're actually building on what you have previously learned. Even when I felt like I understood SOME of the information, the quizzes made me feel like a complete failure as the questions and answers are vague.

By Awase A

Nov 18, 2022

I came here from Udemy thinking that the courses here were better produced and easier to understand. Man was I wrong. Not only do these videos look dated (when were these videos made? 10 years ago), but the IDE they make you use looks like it was made in the 90s. The instructors DO NOT explain anything in detail, leaving me feeling even more confused than when the video started. Most videos are 5 minutes long and the instructor rushes through the topic almost like they don't want to be doing it. As for the readings, NO ONE learns coding through reading. But even if they did, the lectures you force the students to read are almost in a different language. If I need a dictionary and other YouTube videos to explain what I'm reading, then you've failed in your goal of teaching. When you expect me to pay $50 a month for a course, I expect better quality and production than what I can find for free on YouTube. To anyone reading this.... SAVE YOUR MONEY and find free stuff on YouTube, or pay $12-15 on Udemy and get better lectures from there. To anyone who made these video...DO BETTER! This low quality crap is why people get demoralized when they want to learn code and give up.

By Ankur A

Nov 23, 2020

The problem instructions have errors or they are incomplete. I saw that students from 2-4 years ago asked the same questions which they were asking most recently about 1-2 months ago. I think the course staff has missed an opportunity here to improve the documentation and learning experience. Moreover the problem statements for the assignments are vague and ambiguous and you are left scratching your head and browsing through forum posts to figure out where you went wrong. Sorry to say, overall a frustrating experience. The challenge is not in problem solving & coding where is should be, but in trying to untangle confusing and incomplete assignment descriptions.