You may have felt pretty good about your coding skills after finishing IIPP, the pre-requisite to this course. Get ready for a big dose of humility in this course. You will do a whole lot more thinking to produce fewer lines of code. You will come out of this course a more thoughtful programmer and will be writing code that is better-structured and more efficient than what you were used to. The path to this end is not an easy one. Bring along plenty of patience and be ready to let your mind explore.

The instructors make a distinction between computer scientists and coders. If you are planning to pursue a formal education or career in computer science , you will find this course indispensable. If you are a hobbyist-coder, there will be times when you will question why you are continuing with this course. Hang in there. The intellectual reward alone will make it worthwhile.

I'll start by saying that PoC Part 1 is a good course. I took it after completing IIPP Parts 1 and 2. If you are coming from IIPP, you'll find the organization of PoC familiar: there are weekly lectures, a few practice problems, a quiz, and a mini-project. I found this course far more difficult than either of IIPP offerings. In part this is unavoidable since the concepts are more complex and the problems students are asked to solve are correspondingly more challenging. The course introduces various mathematical/statistical concepts that are useful in programming. I had to spend time elsewhere online reviewing these concepts. If you are not familiar with the concepts, I suspect you'll have to do the same as the professors spend little time explaining them. As for the coding: if you took IIPP, you'll know that the professors provided a step-by-step guide for the mini-projects. For the most part, these guides have been jettisoned in PoC. Unless you have programming experience beyond IIPP, you'll likely have a hard time writing the required programs. The only programming experience I had was IIPP, and I found the programming problems in PoC difficult. But at the same time I am a much better programmer now because I was forced to learn lots of stuff on my own in order to get my mini-projects right (I spent lots of time on coding forums and reading through the official Python documentation). If you take PoC after IIPP, you'll also find that the quizzes (now called homework) may well take a considerable amount of time to complete when compared to IIPP. One annoying thing on these quizzes is the "test case" question at the end: the professors ask students to find test cases to check for bugs in various programs. This is doubtless an important skill, but they spent almost no time discussing methods for developing test cases, and if you get the question wrong on the quiz, you'll never know what the correct answer is and hence you don't really learn much from your mistake. Overall, I learned a lot and enjoyed the projects. As I say, PoC is more challenging than IIPP. I enjoyed the class enough that I've just enrolled in PoC Part 2.

Excellent course. I tried several similar courses on Edx and Coursera platforms and found this as the most efficient. The lectures are clearly stated and always accompanied by reading material, which makes it easy to repeat the material.

Practical tasks are very interesting and help to develop practical skills.

It is a wonderful opportunity to learn Python and fundamentals of computing. I highly recommend this course to everyone interested in this subject.

What makes this course unique is that you write and execute Python code right in your browser - the greatest pedagogical value of this for me is that execution slowed down when my programs became too inefficient. It taught me the importance of efficiency on a small scale, and I became mindful of efficiency early on with further assignments. This is a great habit to pick up early on.

My only trouble with the course is that if one's code is too inefficient, Owltest will not grade the assignment. This becomes very frustrating when you cannot make your program more efficient, and I personally had to resort to intentionally writing malfunctioning code which Owltest would take, for the sole purpose of avoiding a 0.0 grade.

In general, I enjoyed this course. However, I found the homework and projects significantly more difficult versus the IIPP course, yet the lecture videos were of the same level. As a result, I spent a lot more time per week to complete this class. Maybe a few more lecture videos would or more guidance on creating test cases would help beginner programmers such as myself?

Either way, I look forward to the next course!

It's quite a step up from the level op IPP. Assignments are also a bit more difficult but still very enjoyable puzzles to solve.

Very good course, I enjoyed it and love the chemistry/humor among all three professors. . I learned a lot and was exposed to many aspects of programming that as a self-taught programmer didn't know much about. The programming assignments were challenging. I only wish we had solutions to the assignments after the course was over (similar to the EDX platform, so we can see how to implement the solutions much more succinctly.

Great course!!! This is the third course I took in this specialization. As always, the professors are nice and the course material is very useful! The mini projects may seem a little challenging in comparison to the previous courses, but with the help of the forum, the mentors and the professors, we'll finally be able to finish them. All in all, I highly recommend this course to people who want to learn python.

I have never had any programing experience before taking this specialization from Rice. I love it! At times I have troubles doing things from the first time, but I never get stuck forever and still learn a lot. It is a bit on the difficult side for me(with zero knowledge before the previous courses), but I enjoy it.

Feels like my grasp of the subject matter is becoming a bit more complete. You may need to do quite a bit of further reading outside of the class material to complete the projects, but it is still very doable with effort for someone at the beginner level.

I highly recommended course if you already have a good basic Python knowledge! It teaches a lot about how to be more efficient in your thinking and gives your mind a really good workout. It thought me quite a lot of new techniques and way of thinking.

Definitely one of the best courses I have taken introducing Computer Science fundamentals while using Python as the language of choice. I highly recommend to anyone looking to learn CS concepts while picking up a very popular higher level language.

Very well structured course. The concepts are explained in detail, the videos are of great quality. The assignmenets give good mix of challenge together with not being overly difficult and discouraging. One of the best courses I've ever had.

It was a great course, I learned a lot about Computing throughout this course. It needs a little analytical mindset but if you work hard enough, I believe it wont be a problem.

This course is very good for beginners and intermediate coders. Gives important basics about computer science from 3 very good professors.

Much harder than "Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python", more frustration and sense of accomplishment. I don't like TEST!

very wellmade assignments! that goes a long way!

plotting seemed a bit superflous and not much learned.

Thank you professors!

Yay, no more peer grading! This course felt easier than intro2. Less fiddling with your programs and more about concepts.

Very good course, with challenging projects. These projects help you also to improve your Python skills.

Very nice courses, I've learnt a lot. Thanks for all the teachers for their preparations and lectures.

definitely gets you thinking the right way about programming (math, algorithms, efficiency, etc.

Another wonderful class in this series. Great, engaging instructors and interesting projects.

Extremely well structured and highly recommended as a beginner course for computer science!

Best specialization for those who want to improve their coding and computational thinking.

Really great course, understanding deeper some principles of computing. Great staff too.