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Back to Writing, Running, and Fixing Code in C

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Writing, Running, and Fixing Code in C by Duke University

4.3
stars
771 ratings

About the Course

Building on the course Programming Fundamentals, this course will teach you how to write code by first planning what your program should do—an important approach for novice and professional programmers. You will learn how to compile and run your program, and then how to test and debug it. This course builds on the Seven Steps you have already learned and provides a framework for systematically testing for problems and fixing them, so you can find and fix problems efficiently....

Top reviews

KK

May 30, 2020

Instructors and the instructors who moderate the forums are great. It is a bit different way to look at programming but it makes sense and I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn C

AE

Jun 14, 2020

It is actually a hard course i guess you need to have at least the basics as some of the assignments were really hard take me a lot of time to do them. especially the poker assignment

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151 - 175 of 188 Reviews for Writing, Running, and Fixing Code in C

By Timmy D

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Sep 21, 2021

I love the contents, but dealing with unknown test cases is extremely time consuming

By Manan J

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Jun 27, 2020

External Grader is complicated and slow. Checking test cases is too difficult.

By Yuqing W

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Apr 4, 2020

The test cases are tedious and not friendly for people not playing pokers

By Zhenmin L

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Oct 4, 2020

the online practice environment is not a good experience for students

By Angela F

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Aug 29, 2020

Maybe the only problem was the instrucctions, but nice work

By Istiaque a A

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Jul 23, 2020

Should increase the amount of video.

By Aquib J T

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Jul 19, 2020

That was pretty tough

By RISHI Y J

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Jun 17, 2020

too hard to code

By Abby P

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Jul 11, 2020

Here's the thing, if you have experience with coding in other languages, then this is probably a good introduction to c. However, if you are new to programming beware! This is not for you. The instructions for the assignments are often vague which personally led me to a significant amount of unnecessary heartache. Moreover, they don't introduce critical concepts before throwing you at problems that are frankly sometime outside an beginner's scope. If you are new, be prepared for hours of googling in an attempt to figure out the concepts they skimmed over of failed to introduce all together. Also, the final poker testing project costs you hours while you attempt to find invisible bugs with the hints basically begin "well you should try thinking like a programmer"

By Tirtharaj S

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Sep 18, 2020

the worst course course ever I enrolled. the ppe grader is just disgusting. the topic or grader is not bad ,grader complexity makes it bad.

By Vignesh B

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Mar 3, 2023

tough to under stand need more detailing for new beginners That's all

By Alec M

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Nov 5, 2020

My token broke and I haven't been able to get help on it since then...

By HARSH G

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Jun 8, 2020

emacs editor is the worst thing in this course rest is good

By Anindita S

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Jan 2, 2020

i can not satisfy with this course

By Afzal R

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May 19, 2022

Bad and frustrating interface....

By Kaitlin S

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Sep 26, 2020

Not enough Instructions

By Hansani B

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May 9, 2020

I enrolled to this course with very high expectations as to the fact that I can learn the C language, but I was disappointed when I got know that the teacher(s) were in fact teaching things which were basically IQ tests. There were some parts in the teachings that were logically "broken" as well.

The teacher(s) seemed to "show off" by making very simple things extremely complex. Mind you, this course is for beginners, but you can't even pass certain assignments if you don't even have at least a slight bit of knowledge of the C language. If you were planning on learning everything from scratch, I think this course would be useless and you should look elsewhere.

Therefore, I have decided to not participate in this course due to those matters.

By Anton A

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Jul 18, 2023

Too many of the assignments are "guesswork". I know if you have a methodical approach it is not guesswork. But this is now how you look for bugs, this is not how you would write tests. This is just forcing users to write lines and lines of examples without actually debugging the code. Looking at forum posts, responses from staff are not as quick as one would expect. Also there is too heavy of a focus on emacs. Nevermind the editor, use the actual terminal instead which is accessible to everyone, especially since vim is also an available editor in the environment.

By Apostol B

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Jul 27, 2020

I intended to take the whole specialization and I got through the first two courses when I decided that continuing is pointless. My goal was to become more proficient in C programming. Instead there was relatively little code to be written and I spent most of my time on black box testing. If I wanted a course in black box testing, that is what I would looked for. Even though I completed the first two courses, I consider them a waste of time and effort. I do not recommend them.

By Justin M

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Mar 7, 2021

So disappointed in this class/specialization. The tools (programming environment) is buggy, slow, and a pain to use. Instruction is lacking in content and clarity. Had to waste massive amounts of time googling and looking up explanations on discussion boards.

I've taken over 50 Coursera courses, and this is the first specialization I quit because I just couldn't keep putting more effort into taking the course than the instructors put into making it.

By Jose A R A

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Apr 23, 2021

Really bad course. Assignment are poorly explained, you spend more time deducting what is required than getting things done. Practice exercises requires yo to know a lot more than what is explained in the theory classes. Completing practical exercises for debugging and testing is a nightmare and provides no lessons to be applied in real life. A very poor course overall, I would not recommend it to anyone.

By Scipio

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Oct 27, 2023

The grading program was horrible. I follow the instruction, make a mistake, reload the webpage, and now I couldn't emacs back to the file I just read to fix it. It keeps saying emacs is running, but when I press fg, it say bash:...... Fix this thing.

By muhammad i

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Dec 24, 2020

good basics but the terminal environment sometimes stuck after I use it for a while, so annoying and wasting time. I need to refresh my browser again and again. can you just offer basic online editor that works like other website? thank u

By Afkar A

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May 12, 2021

instructors are not good. Can't even complete the first assignment 2nd course because there are no clear instructions (written). Some instructors just read and don't explain properly. too fast

By Mir

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Jun 5, 2020

The things you use for the course do not even work half the time which makes you frustrated. For exampe, 1 time in a week the application to do the assignments would work.