Programming for Everybody — Getting Started with Python (University of Michigan)

Programming for Everybody — Getting Started with Python (University of Michigan) ranks 3rd on the list of best online python courses.. The overall best Python course for beginners has to be Programming for Everybody, which is offered by the University of Michigan on Coursera. With nearly 2.5 million enrollments, this is Coursera's most popular Python course — and for good reason. The course is a welcoming introduction to the world of programming.

It assumes from the start that you have no experience coding or understanding of how programs work. It then progresses from concept to concept, assisting you in developing a thorough understanding of the Python language. All you need to take this course is a basic understanding of arithmetic. After finishing the course, you will be prepared to take on more advanced programming courses.

What you will learn:

• The course doesn’t immediately start with programming, but instead starts with what you’ll be programming on: a computer.
• What are the basic components of a computer? What is a program, and how does a computer understand it? Why is it so easy for a computer to not do what you tell it to do? These are the questions that you’ll be able to answer by the end of the first part of the course.
• Afterwards, you’ll be shown how to install and run Python on your machine and how to choose a suitable code editor. And then, you’ll get to write code! You’ll be taught the vocabulary of Python, its unique “grammar”, as well as higher-level programming concepts.
• You’ll know how to write variables and expressions to store and compute values, which can be of different data types. You’ll know how and why you can use conditional statements to specify branching conditions in your code. You’ll be taught about functions and arguments, and how to leverage them for code reuse. Last but not least, you’ll understand what loops and iterations do.
• By the end of the course, you’ll know how to write a program that accepts user input, computes a result, and returns an output to the user. A complete experience indeed!

How You’ll Learn

• The course is broken down into 7 weeks, with each week containing about 4 hours of video lectures and programming tasks. The lectures themselves are based on the book that can be found on the accompanying course website, and they’ve been translated into 9 languages, if English isn’t your strong suit.
• Coding assessments, which usually have to be completed two or three times a week, are found on the same course website and will either be automatically graded or graded by another learner taking the course.

Fun Facts

• This course is the first of the five in the specialization Python for Everybody. If you’d like to round up your Python skills after finishing this course, here’s the next one in the series: Python Data Structures — which can also be audited for free.
• If you'd like to take the whole specialization for free, with extra projects, and get a free certification on top, check out the fourth item in this ranking.
• This course has over 123k bookmarks and 35k reviews on Class Central.
• Dr. Chuck’s course is a part of both a list of most-popular courses of all time and best courses of all time. So yeah, this was an easy first pick.
• The course instructor Dr. Chuck is a super popular instructor. If you like his teaching, be sure to check out his other courses on Django and Web Applications.

Rating: 4.9/5.0

Enroll here: classcentral.com/course/python-4319