Introduction to Python Programming, Udemy [In-Depth Course Review]

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Introduction to Python Programming is an online course on Udemy by Avinash Jain, a well-capable 16 year old high school student with an impressive repertoire of having taught 90,000+ students at the time. It goes over a vast amount of topics and content from Lists and Dictionaries to some Object-Oriented Programming as well.

Read more: 5 BEST Online Courses to Learning Computer Science in 2023

Table of Contents

Course Overview

  • Skill Level: Beginner
  • Price: FREE
  • Duration: 1.5 Hours
  • Material: 3 Sections, 16 Video Lectures, additional access to the course creator’s website
  • Students enrolled at the time of taking: ~788,000
  • Course requirements/prerequisites: None, but we would recommend to have some prior experience programming
  • Topics Covered:
    1. Getting Started with Python
    2. Variables and Multiple Assignment
    3. Arithmetic Operators and Strings
    4. Placeholders in Strings
    5. Introduction to Lists
    6. Introduction to Dictionaries
    7. Tuples
    8. Conditional Statements
    9. For Loops
    10. While Loops
    11. Try and Except
    12. Functions
    13. In-Built Functions
    14. Object-Oriented Programming
    15. Inheritance

My Rating

Teacher and Class Material
Content
Engagement
Pace
Value

Pros and Cons

Pros
> Good and engaging teaching
> Wide range of topics

Cons
> Not really an ‘introductory’ course
> Does not go in-depth into the fundamentals
> Many surface level explanations and insufficient examples

3.7

Who This Course Is For

This course is labelled as an ‘Introduction’ course. However, due to the content and the teacher’s explanations (read more below), I would not recommend this course if you are a brand new programmer, as it skips over some of the important fundamentals and covers some intermediate python concepts (such as dictionaries and OOP inheritance) that can be discovered later in your programming journey.

If you are a beginner with absolutely no experience, perhaps start with a course such as Beginner Course on Programming and Coding Fundamentals. However, if you have done some programming in a different language and are looking to start on python, this course would be suitable.

The Breakdown

Teacher and Class material – 3.5/5

Avinash Jain is an impressive 16 year old teacher who does not seem as such. He carries a very impressive resume and set of achievements in the course and his own website. However, in this review, we will be as objective and impartial as possible, judging only by the quality of the course.

https://thecodex.me/ (Jain’s own website)

Jain is an active and bubbly teacher that has ample experience teaching, shown by the sheer size of his audience. His attitude towards teaching shows in his teaching style and tone.

In terms of the course material, Introduction to Python Programming does not contain much else apart from video lectures. If students take the time to explore Jain’s website, they may find more useful supplementary materials that would are great for learning, such as personal project ideas. But for the course itself, there are several other free introductory python courses that provide much more on the platform.

The materials provided are great for content, but below satisfactory to providing a complete ‘learning experience’ with quizzes, assignments etc.

Content – 3.5/5

The course is plit into 3 Sections of video lectures. The first contains a very quick 1 minute video introduction as well as a note to link to Jain’s external website that contains a large amount of supplementary material that could be used following the course. The second contains the bulk of the content with 15 video lectures and the last section. is a note to how to continue from this course.

Content-wise, I think this course does not exactly qualify for an ‘introductory’ course as I feel the concepts are slightly more advanced and can be left after gaining some experience programming.

For example, string slicing and string placeholders are already introduced in the early stages of the course, and there is no real explanation for important basics such as booleans. He also skims over OOP with a very surface level explanations of very theoretical topics such as inheritance.

As he labels this a course suitable for those who “haven’t touched coding before”, I think the content misses the mark. Going into each topic in more depth would be much more beneficial for new programmers as compared to covering more, but at a more surface level.

If you are a complete beginner, check out Beginner Course on Programming and Coding Fundamentals or Python For Beginners, both on Udemy.

Engagement – 4/5

Jain has good engagement and speaks in a clear and concise manner with extremely fluent english.

His teaching style is energetic and engaging, and he mainly uses the PyDev Console live screen recording which is great for on the fly examples and quick explanations. However, as mentioned, perhaps using a text editor or IDE would have been a better option for newer programmers to follow along and start out writing their first few programs as it is easier to manoeuvre, as shown in the functions lecture.

PyDev Console live screen recording used in the course

As the course only consists of video lectures without review quizzes or short assignments, some points were lost here as these are great features to review the content covered so far and keep students engaged by constantly testing their own knowledge.

If not, some examples of actual python programs would be great to demonstrate the actual process of programming in python, instead of using the console for quick examples that make the video lectures feel like more of a content crash course.

Pace – 3.5/5

In terms of course pace, this course is on the faster side, which unfortunately, is a trade off for some of the content depth. The pace of the course causes many concepts, some of which are essential for new programmers to know inside out, to be explained briefly. Whilst it is nice to have such a jam-packed course, we do not feel it is worth it if it is losing out on quality explanations for the important beginner topics.

As such, the content covered seems to jump to more complicated topics extremely quickly. For example, Lists are introduced just 5 lectures in, which I felt was a bit big of a jump.

Value – 4/5

Compared to other introductory courses, even others that are free, there is nothing special from this course in terms of supplementary notes or assignments to aid the students’ programming journeys.

However, a big bonus here is that Jain’s personal website offers more than a student could ask for, with personal projects, learning tracks and much more to explore. Hence, if students go out of their way, they will find more than enough resources to get started.

Conclusion

For complete beginners with no experience in programming, this is perhaps not the ‘introductory’ course for you. However, if you have done some sort of programming in any language or have some knowledge of the basic concepts, then this course is great to extend that knowledge using python. It covers a vast amount of concepts, but be prepared to have to look elsewhere to dive deeper to individual concepts if you do not understand.

What could I do with the knowledge in this course?

  • Lists and Dictionaries
  • Functions
  • Object-Oriented Programming

Combine these and try to create a shop ordering system in python!

Read more: Python For Beginners, Udemy [In-Depth Course Review]

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