Yeah this is definitely a fear of mine, it does feel like you can get through the course and mostly understand the concept without getting the tools to fully apply the learnings. Like drothlis points out the Coursera course it very hand-holdey too. For the exercises you are given a set of Matlab/Octave files and your objective is to fill in a few of them with the correct implementation of specific steps. It doesn't feel like you ever get to perform the full task, I plan to redo some of the exercises with Python after I finishes the course.