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Quality Score

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Overall Score : 86 / 100

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Course Description

Learn the basics of Go, an open source programming language origilly developed by a team at Google and enhanced by many contributors from the open source community. This course is designed for individuals with previous programming experience using such languages as C, Python, or Java, and covers the fundamental elements of Go. Topics include data types, protocols, formats, and writing code that incorporates RFCs and JSON. Most importantly, you'll have a chance to practice writing Go programs and receive feedback from your peers. Upon completing this course, you'll be able to implement simple Go programs, which will prepare you for subsequent study at a more advanced level.

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Instructor Details

Ian Harris

Ian G. Harris is currently Vice Chair of Undergraduate Education in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Irvine. He received his BS degree in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. He received his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego in 1992 and 1997 respectively. He was a member of the faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1997 until June 2003. Professor Harris serves on the program committees of several leading conferences in hardware design verification and security including IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, and IEEE Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). Professor Harris serves on the program committees of several leading conferences in hardware design verification and security including IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, and IEEE Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST).

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Reviews

4.3

129 total reviews

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By Donguk L on 23-Jan-19

I think it would have been more convinient if the coding assigntments were graded automatically.

By Alec J on 18-May-19

I like the instructor, and the material was certainly worthwhile, but I do have some constructive criticism. 1. There were too many typos in the lecture slides. Spending my time debugging the professor's code strikes me as counterproductive. 2. There are a lot of things you have to look up on your own in order to complete the assignments. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the instructor could be clear about this at the outset. 3. The whole peer-grading scheme is ridiculous. If I went to my local university, took a course, and the professor said "you all have to grade each others' assignments," I'd be righteously upset about this. I don't see why the Coursera platform is inherently that much different so as to justify this absurd practice. Why should I trust that the other students are equipped and responsible enough to grade anything, particularly something they're learning at the same time as me?

By Lorenzo N on 16-Jun-19

Very, very basic. They say the course is for people with knows other programming languages, but the expected knowledge is very low. For example, a very long explanation about variable scope is for absolute beginners. If you are proficient in any other language like C, C# or Java, you have listened to this explanation N-times in your life and the course is probably too slow paced for you.

By Carlos E C M on 9-Apr-19

Good intro to golang basics, if you are not familiar with golang this would be a nice course for you. Things to consider if you're paying for this course: The topics are very basic, slides may contain some typos, the video lectures are not updated so erros may be there for a while, the course staff do not respond in the forums, its a peer graded course and many people complain about it, I found myself a little dissapointed about it.

By John G on 29-Jul-19

The video instruction is very superficial.For example, in the video on variables, the instructor says something like, "the Go garbage collector is fast, and that's all you need to worry about." I disagree. The details of garbage collection are important factors in understanding if a language is appropriate for a particular use case, especially when performance and throughput matter.I would expect a more thorough discussion of the implementation of the language in a course provided by a major university.

By Chenzhe X on 7-Oct-18

Too much typos in the codes, misleading in some cases

By Igor K on 6-Nov-18

I would not recommend this course. It has many syntax errors. Assessments often rely on a subjects which are not explained yet. Assessments have misleading descriptions. Does not worth your money.

By sudhanshu p on 2-Apr-19

One of best course i encountered for teaching a new programming languages.People with none C programming background may feel trouble but with some effort you can easily catch up.

By Luiz C on 7-Nov-18

Interesting Course for anyone interested by Go programming, but Course is really targetted at beginner programmers

By Alessandro L on 8-Feb-19

The instruction of some of the tasks could have been more clear and less ambiguous (e.g a String of 20 characters on Week 4 task).

By Rob S on 13-Dec-18

The material and pace are good. My only complaint is with the peer review grading system. I've taken other courses (Odersky's Scala series) where grading is automated by unit tests. Given Golang's high reliance on testing in practice, that would seem to be a much better approach here.

By David S D on 18-Jan-19

I am writing this after having actually completed all three courses in this series. I would rate all of them well. The instructor is fine for me, but there is an occasional error in his slides. But the selection of material was good and the tests and homework were also fine.The one thing that was disappointing to me is the peer to peer grading format of the course programming exercises. Apparently there are not a large number of students taking these courses and so I sometimes had to wait days to get feedback and grades for my assignments. I actually finished the 3rd course before I had the last programming assignment from the 2nd course graded.It was annoying enough that I might well shy away from taking courses with peer grading in the future.On balance, though I have to say I enjoyed all three of these courses and I definitely leave them behind a better Go programmer than I was before.