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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Getting Started with Go by University of California, Irvine

4.6
stars
2,272 ratings

About the Course

Learn the basics of Go, an open source programming language originally 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....

Top reviews

JP

Apr 4, 2020

Great intro. If you already know the basics, you probably don't need this course though. Not much of a deep dive, more of a "skim the surface" type course. Week 4 on IO was the most beneficial for me.

AN

Oct 23, 2020

Very detailed, nice introduction to golang's basic concepts. Might need to google to find better ways to handle some requirements of the assignments, but overall a cool programming language to learn.

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376 - 400 of 565 Reviews for Getting Started with Go

By yichen z

•

May 1, 2019

nice

By David K

•

Aug 30, 2020

The things I liked more: good introductory videos, so far the course seems to be structured well

The things I liked less: forums are filled with requests to grade assignments, with very sporadic discussion of the course material; it's unclear what language features to explore in the golang documentation and how much exploration is acceptable - for instance, it's unclear sometimes when coming from other programming languages, the peculiarity, and advantages of slices - a deeper discussion on the subject would be appreciated. I tried giving fair assessment on peer-graded assignments but the feedback options are quite limited, copy/pasted formatted code from a terminal in the feedback would be more useful, I think - the current form field is pretty limiting.

By Andy M

•

Jun 18, 2020

Content is really good with a good pace (as long as you already know some programming).

Modules short enough and have a lot of detail however, you still need to read the documentation as the course doesn't spoon feed you every bit of syntax you need for the assessments. Personally think this is great as makes you do a little bit of reading and searching for the answers to help enforce the information provided.

Only issue is the assessments words can be confusing and often asked for things that are then not checked during the peer-grading. As an example one assessment stats "the program should create an empty integer slice of size (length) 3" but this is never checked by the reviewer.

By Inpyo H

•

Oct 26, 2018

The course teaches basic with minimal examples. To complete course assignments later on, you need to do some research on your own to figure out. If you are already an experienced programmer I doubt this is a concern. But if you are a completely new comer, this maybe a road-block.

So my suggestion for improvement is provide some guide for students in searching certain necessary APIs that maybe needed to complete assignments.

This is not a course designed you to understand mechanisms of Golang internally but rather really, to "get started with basic Golang coding".

By Oleg D

•

Oct 30, 2020

The tasks are not very obvious, the criteria for evaluating students ' work leave much to be desired - you can write everything that works, nothing about the code style or the acceptability of any moves.

I think the course has a strange niche - beginners with 0 experience will find it difficult to understand what was meant, and those who have programming experience will easily complete a month-long course in a week, even after missing a few days.

I think it's good for someone like me who writes some code, but you need to quickly clarify some basic things.

By Eike M T

•

Mar 30, 2021

I'd highly recommend the course. Professor Harris is an excellent instructor. It would be nice, though, if adapt the course's material would be adapted to the current version of Go. For example, with the introduction of Go Modules, the idea of having a single directory for all Go code (the GOPATH) has been dropped. Thus, in the beginning of the course I had to read through additional manuals and best practices to find out how to organize my code. Still, the course is a great introduction to the Go language. Thank you very much!

By Sergey F

•

May 29, 2020

Overall the course is very helpful to get into the basics of the Golang language, but I see some areas which definitely should be improved. The main issue I see for myself was assignments. The task description is very blurry and you can't really understand what is really expected, what are acceptance criteria, and how to assess someone's submission. For instance all of the "Peer review" contains phrases like "check that output correct", but how should I know that it's correct? Why no correct example is given?

By Royce H

•

May 14, 2020

Course in entry level from a golang perspective but you do need some programming experience. I'm hoping the instructor gets better with follow on courses. There are lots of references to things we will learn and there are gaps in material covered versus some of the programming assignments. Early course needs some explanation of differences of golang on windows, linux, mac as peer reviewed assignments may run on your system but not person who is peer reviewing.

By Anna S

•

Jul 10, 2020

The grading system for p2p assignments is a bit confusing: it looks like it makes it easy to misclick the first question ("the program is written 3 pt" vs "the program compiles 5pt"), which people do quite often (e.g. they select 3pt instead of 5pt, and then select all the additional points that actually *require* running the program).

It would be great to instead have an automatic build system that checks that the .go file can be compiled.

By Edwin D

•

Oct 30, 2020

As an introduction to programming in Go, the course was fine. Particularly the opportunity to work on different exercises was useful. However, even when I only have a couple of weeks working with Go, I found it a bit too basic. There were a few mistakes in some of the slides and I disagree with a few explanations from the professor, but I believe those are minor details. In general I think the course is good and worth my time.

By ヒミエイゾウ

•

May 26, 2020

It was a great course! Especially, after the test was submitted, it was a great learning experience due to the mechanism that students could check the code with each other. Unfortunately, before I submitted my test, I felt that I had less opportunity to learn how to share code tips within the coursera. I felt that it would be even better if the students could learn more from each other.

By Harshavardhan R

•

Jan 24, 2019

I have audited this course. The explanation is very crisp. All the concepts were covered clearly. Assignments are challenging and I found them interesting. Must take course for beginners. I have given 4* as I felt the author must have emphasised a little bit more on methods(at least introduction on their working) as some assignments required their understanding. I felt that to be a miss.

By Swarnim N

•

Jun 15, 2020

It is a very good course to pursue beginners, at the start I was scared that this course might be a little advance for me but the professor Ian Harris teaches so well that all the fundamentals of programming are covered very well. I am now enjoying Golang very much. A must-do course for anyone who has little knowledge of programming and wants to get started with Go.

By Yanfei C

•

Jun 19, 2022

This course explains the basic concept in Go programming pretty clearly and in details. It is very straightforward if you are already familiar with another programming language.

Hoewever, it would be great if the assignment could be graded by an autograder instead of peer-reviews. The assignment description could also be clarified in order to reduce confusions.

By Chauncey G S J

•

Jun 12, 2019

Not enough direction for assignments. I believe there is ambiguity and it leaves peers to grade assignments incorrectly. For example, the 1st assignment says to show proof of compilation and that the program submission runs successfully. I did both in one-step using 'go run filename.go' and provided the screenshot, yet I had to re-submit my assignment.

By Aleksandar N

•

Dec 17, 2019

The material presented is beginner-friendly. Concise and straight to the point.

The issue with the course is that assignments are easy, in my opinion. And there is a somewhat big waiting time for the peer review process to finish. Also, discussion forums are filled with requests for reviews, instead of questions related to the corresponding topics.

By Tristan B

•

Jul 1, 2020

This course could really use a better testing regime (see the Odersky Scala class with fully automated test suites and submission). I also found some of the prompts to be a little to vague (in particular read.go should really show the actual file format as the part about the fields being 20 characters turns out to be a red herring).

By Michael W

•

May 30, 2020

The coarse gives an initial introduction to GO and some basic programming overview. I'd place it as a second year college coarse for computer science. A couple of rough spots on the assignments indicates that it hasn't been updated since originally created a few years ago. But - still useful.

By Chris H

•

Jan 1, 2021

A good introduction to Go and some of the reasons you might choose Go over another programming language. Some of the assignments ask you to do things that aren't covered in the video lectures, but that encourages exploration of the Golang documentation and other online resources.

By Daniel N

•

Aug 4, 2021

I think this course is a good introduction to Golang. I've especially liked the instructor's way of explaining things. However I really don't like the peer-review concept at all. I believe for a programming course it's a must to have an automatic grading system.

By Florian G

•

Sep 16, 2019

Exercise descriptions could be a bit more detailed. E.g. oftentimes, the task description did not exclude some edge-cases that took quite some effort to implement, but in the peer-review process these edge-cases were usually not tested. Otherwise, great course!

By Sudarshan G

•

May 13, 2020

The course is a pretty good beginners course. The assignment wordings could be better. Its vague at times. I would have loved to see the mentors chime in a little when there is confusion in the discussion board. I havent seen participation of mentors at all.

By Mitesh V

•

May 20, 2020

Course content is good and covered most of the points, only thing I felt was the compared to the questions asked in assessments the course content was fairly easy taught so needed pretty good amount of research to get things done else it was wonderful.

By Eric W

•

Apr 1, 2021

Very good overall, a couple of things were a little ambiguous in the labs in terms of specifics around things like data formats etc - which makes it a bit challenging to make, but very good overall. Lots of useful information and very well explained!

By Gitesh C

•

May 23, 2019

Professor is not active on forums and there are some mistakes in slides. The assignments are way too easy but good enough to get a hands on the language. They do make you look around on the internet for syntax. I'm pleased with the course.