Python For Beginners by Piritheevi Raman on Udemy is an extremely beginner friendly online course for getting started in python. It is a short and succint course that packs in the basics of programming and some exercises for anyone that completes it to be able to create their first lines of code!
Table of Contents
- Course Overview
- Who This Course Is For
- The Breakdown
- Conclusion
- What could I do with the knowledge in this course?
Course Overview
- Skill Level: Beginner
- Price: FREE
- Duration: 1.5 Hours
- Material: 11 video lectures, 11 short quizzes, 2 review assignments
- Students enrolled at the time of taking: ~5000
- Course requirements/prerequisites: None! Just you and your computer
- Topics Covered:
- Lecture 1 – Course overview
- Lecture 2 – Why python
- Lecture 3 – Python IDE (Python Virtual Machine and Eclipse IDE, PyDev)
- Lecture 4 – Hello Word Program (print statements)
- Lecture 5 – Numbers and Math function
- Lecture 6 – Common errors in python
- Lecture 7 – Variables and names
- Lecture 8 – String basics
- Lecture 9 – Conditional statements
- Lecture 10 – Functions
- Lecture 11 – For and While Loops
My Rating
Who This Course Is For
This course is for the absolute beginner programmers or those with little experience. There are absolutely no prerequisites or prior knowledge required and it covers all of the basics to get your first program out, along with useful topics such as strings, function declarations and loops. The teacher, Raman, is clear and engaging and makes this course an excellent starting platform to dive into the world of python.
The Breakdown
Teacher and Class material – 4.5/5
Piritheevi Raman has had 10 years of experience in front-end and back-end programming in python with a passion for education and teaching. He speaks extremely clear and fluently which makes the course easy to follow.
He conducts this course mainly through screen recordings of himself giving a live walkthrough of the examples in each topic, which allows for students to follow along and boost the course engagement. The live examples also help to make the content clearer. Any slides used are well-presented and not cluttered with words.
However, the best part about the course is undoutably the quizzes and 2 assignments that help to test the students’ knowledge and ensure that they have learnt something in each section. The assignments also provide some practical experience to kickstart the students’ journeys to programming.
On top of the course content, he provides “good to know” tips as well as advice for how students can further their knowledge beyond the course.
Content – 4.5/5
The course covers everything a new programmer would need to know. He covers basics such as variables and simple arithmetic operations, then moves on to slightly more complicated topics such as functions and loops. However, it does a great job and providing sufficient information without overloading students with too much in their first 2 hours of diving into python.
The course is split into 2 sections, the first from lectures 1 – 6 and the second from 7 – 11. Each lecture is accompanied by a short 3 or 4 question quiz to review the material and each section is ended with an assignment of 10 and 15 minutes respectively, which as I said, are great for boosting the students’ learning experience.
Raman starts the course with some history and background information of python, which is nice for new programmers to know. Then, his guide for installing the necessary software for the course is extremely in-depth and he basically walks the students through the whole process, which is great for brand new programmers who may get lost!
Perhaps the only qualms that I would have with the content is that he introduces the students to Pycharm, which is no longer free to the community. However, that was a recent change so hard to fault him there. The other would be that the examples in lecture 6 were slightly harder to understand in that they involved concepts that were not taught, such as lists and dictionaries. However, these are small issues and his explanations were still sufficient.
Engagement – 4/5
As mentioned, the best part about this course is the review materials in the form of quizzes and assignments. It gets a solid 5/5 for engagement due to the fact that students have to pay close attention if they want to advance through the course. It also encourages students to take down notes for their reference.
Each video lecture is on average ~10min, which is great for maximising students’ attention spans as each video is not too draggy but still covers good ground. Supplemented with the short quizzes, the students are constantly engaged for the entire 1.5 hours.
On top of this, Raman’s screen recordings and live examples allow students to follow along on their own IDEs in real time, which helps them with some guidance in navigating through their first dabblings in code. A student can easily play around with their own code by taking reference to the video lectures, allowing them to experiment with guidance.
He also provides succint summaries at the end of every lecture to help review the content so far. If there would be one thing to improve, it would be that his tone is slightly monotonous and could be a bit more engaging.
Pace – 5/5
For a 1.5 hours course, albeit not long, Raman does a good job at the pacing in the course. The short video format that covers one topic in one video makes the 1.5 hours seem to fly by.
On top of that, he covers the material and examples with clear and concise explanations, which makes each lecture packed with knowledge despite the short format. All in all, for a 1.5 hour course, he covers just about as much as is appropriate, and does a good job at making it pass by in the blink of an eye without it being the least bit underwhelming.
Value – 4.5/5
As a free course, this goes above and beyond in value due to the additional exercises it provides. The short format quizzes and long format assignments are great additions to the free course, so plus points in value there.
Furthermore, the course offers student feedback, which is great to see. If there was one thing to add that other courses have is a set of notes to take home. However, this also encourages student note-taking, so issues in terms of course value.
Conclusion
To round off, this is an excellent course for anyone who wants to dip their feet into the world of python programming. As a free course, it packs a hefty amount of information with a great teacher, making it a great contender compared to many paid python courses out there. If you are looking for a short but jam-packed course to kickstart your python journey, this could be the one for you.
What could I do with the knowledge in this course?
- Print out statements
- Basic arithmetic operations
- Conditional statements
- Functions
Combine these and try to code out a calculator in python!
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