I didn't understand a thing and they expect too much from beginners.

Also they try to make simple things complicated.

Similarly to the bad quality of the first course, there was not enough content for a beginner.

The videos were not enough, the readings were confusing.

As a beginner, I had a very hard time to understand the material and to deliver results. A lot of personal research in online material and videos was required in order to understand the supposedly 'Beginner' material provided by this course.

In overall, the material was complicated and confusing and not at all helpful for a beginner. I would say it was a discouraging experience for a beginner.

I wouldn't recommend it for true beginners to programming, only if you are experienced in other languages you can go through easily through this course.

Great lectures and readings, but some of the assignments at the end took quite a while due to the instructions being slightly unclear. The instructions could be improved by letting the student know what context their function is going to be called in by the grader script. For example, is the grader going to call my function in main, or within another function I wrote? Also, is the grader going to print using its own printf call, or is it going to call my print function (which is important to know, as it may or may not effect the state of the output variables if the print function is calling other functions). Besides those minor nitpicks, it was a great course overall.

Wonderful course. The black-box testing was very puzzling, and I wish that I had had access to some pseudocode. Will you every have a job where you have a test code without knowing the programming intent? A small gripe.

This course gives you a great overview (in reasonable depth) of the tools and concepts that you need when starting as a novice programmer. Strongly recommended.

Great introduction into learning how to develop algorithms, translating them into code (compiling them), testing that code, and debugging that code.

As accustomed by now when it comes to Duke University, Drew and the colleagues, it was just perfect how they pass on the knowledge.

The course description says that it's aimed at beginners and that has proven to be true. Most quizzes and assignments can be answered directly from the material presented in the course. Basic troubleshooting strategies are presented and the student is introduced to gnu gdb. The course forum is active with a very high instructor participation rate.

The only mark against taking this course would be the Coursera platform itself. The forums are full of messages of people completing assignments and not being given credit for it. Then the instructors have to work behind the scenes with Coursera to get them to correct their error.

The course itself is nice, but the testing is horrible. In no company in the world you would not know the testcase. In this course you have to guess them. That was crazy

I picked and chose what I wanted from this course, but I think it's an excellent introduction to some of the concepts that _surround_ the C programming language, like gdb, makefiles, and valgrind.

Unlike later programming languages (like Java and Python), writing correct C code is really only part of the way to making progress on a project in C. You'll quickly develop a need for makefiles as a means of automating and streamlining your builds, you'll shoot yourself in the foot with the freedom that C allows you and will need either gdb or valgrind (or both) to find out what's going wrong, and you'll be asked to troubleshoot a kind-of working binary that you didn't write and have little familiarity with.

Writing C is a skill. Using C is a slightly different, and equally important skill. This course teaches you how to use C.

Excellent Course! I was thinking on diving right into the Java course, in order to get into web development and other areas fo software development, but i'm glad I did this course (and hopefully, will manage to go trough the whole specialization). This course helps us to really think programmatically and how to tackle problems, and i feel much more confident now to tackle any other language, like C++, Java, etc. It's a tough course, but it sure is amazing once you figured it out how to solve each problem. Also, it's a great way to get comfortable using the command line and native UNIX text editors like emacs.

I enjoy this course. Some exercises were quite tough, I spend several nights solving problems that I didn't face before. But those times I think I learnt quite a lot. It forces you to think about the problem, see it from a different perspective, especially poker game testing. I also appreciate of TAs in course forum.

Very good and interesting. Authors put a lot of work to create this course, and it did not go in vain. They put in your head not only C Programming knowledge, but practical tips on how to get job done better and why. I have experience in Python programming, but this course is like fresh air breeze.

The course material and exercises are well designed , clear and thorough. The course instructor and teaching stuff answer question promptly. I like the professional tools used in this course especially. Highly recommend for those who want get started on programming in C.

With every course of this, learning more and more about c programming language and how it all works and what goes into making a project!

The instructors as well as the material they provided was very good and helped a lot. Learnt various principles and a bit poker :P

Great course. Challenging assignments but with the help of the discussion forums feasible.

The structure of the course and especially the assignments can give you a great learning success - much better than just reading a book or watching some programming videos.

Great! Learn how to debug and how to use some useful tools to test your code. Even though the final projects in course 2 is hard but worth trying, take your time, ask your instructors when you're stuck and learn something new in the discussion forum.

An excellent course. Even though I have previous experience with languages like Python and Java, C is very much different. This course explains everything in depth and is very challenging even for people with some previous knowledge.

Great way of teaching things! Different cases, algorithms and ideas were very well illustrated. There were some wonderful approaches to problems. Quick and helpful answers to questions posted on forums is definitely appreciable.

Very detailed and very helpful. Thanks to the tutors for putting together such a detailed course where nothing seems rushed while at the same time everything is explained.

A really awesome course. Puts forth the basic concepts clearly so that anybody can understand. This course has inspired me to learn and improve my C programming skills.

More hands on than my native college course in ECE (10+ years back) with an increased focus on practical tools for programmers.

The blackbox testing assigments were sometimes frustrating, But I think forrcing to think about those was good for me :).

Black box testing is very useful skill.

I would never use gdb if these guys did not make me. I'm happy they did! :)

best online course for beginners. But question and assignment should be explained in some more details.