gg

Although the teaching was still great, the projects were more of a slog to get through and took way more time. Most of the projects were to build "translators" (in another language such as Java or Python that is otherwise unrelated to the course) to bridge the low level language of the computer to a programming language. While I can understand the learning that comes with how this is done and techniques to use, I felt that there was just too much programming relative to the lessons.

One of the best MOOCs I've ever taken. Some of the parts during numbers of projects were tricky enough to spend hours Googling and searching for an answer. However, you may find the answers in the discussion forum on Coursera or nand2tetris forum. It is definitely not an easy course, but worthwhile to take. One thing if I may append, some of the lecture PDFs still contain contents that may give fellow learners some amount of frustrations. I hope those will be fixed soon.

It was a fun course, yet it's super involved! Please be sure to have a solid understanding of computer programming and computer science before you take this course!

It was a bit superficial. Homework helped to practice the basics. I prefer more detailed and more deep lectures.

The Exercises were a bit hard, but everything else was fantastic!

very interesting, good lectures,

Overall, the course was good. But it has problems:

First, there are technical issues with the automatic grader (the program that checks the assignments' correctness). Despite the proffessors' sympathy for the Java programming language, the grader uses a very old version of the language. I found that out the hard way after already writing the first programming assignment in Java. I had to spend 2 hours refactoring the newer Java features out of my code. And yet, the grader still didn't accept my submission because it could not find the main file, despite it literally being there! (Problem that was only reported after the Java compiler succssefully parsed all of my refactored code). I ended up giving up on Java and I translated the assignment into Python. This time, I had learned my lesson and I began with a dummy submission that printed the version of the Python language the grader was using to the standard output, which also confirmed that the grader was indeed working properly. At the time of writing this, the version was Python 3.8.6.

Second, despite reporting, and posting about, the issues, nothing has been done to address the problem. And this is not ok. The maintainers of a supposedly high quality course such as this should regularly update the programming languages their grader supports to the latest versions, as well as inform the course taker about which versions are currently supported.