Categories
Product Review

How to Be A Human Lie Detector – Course Review

How to Be A Human Lie Detector is a course about – you guessed it – how to detect lies. This is done by learning how to notice microexpressions, body language, voice changes and even differences in the language employed when answering a question.

The course consists of a few hours of videos, plus a few downloadable PDFs. The videos are light and pleasant to watch, and fairly concise.

Overall, it took me about 4 hours, although I really think I should go through some of the critical videos again to actually learn the stuff beyond a basic level. Recommended if you are interested in the topic, but I'd wait for one of Udemy's coupons instead of paying full price.

Categories
Product Review

Rails for Zombies Redux/Rails for Zombies 2 – Course Review

I recently took the Rails for Zombies Redux and Rails for Zombies 2 courses on CodeSchool. I had already learned some Rails on a Software Engineering Course , but I thought these would be helpful, specially since I didn't touch anything on Rails after I finished the course. I also intend to rewrite the user key generation/retrieval of my software to use either a Rails app or WordPress.

The courses are interesting and fairly light. They consist of short videos and usually very simple challenges, that mostly just require you to read the notes. There is a zombie theme on the code (which is mostly about a Twitter for Zombies), that lightens up the topic somehow. The challenges take place in an easy to use in browser coding system. You just type some code and click submit (keyboard shortcuts don't seem to work on Chrome), and get the results.

Challenges always worked fine, but I found that on some courses on CodeSchool video simply refuses to play. However, I just downloaded these, so problem solved  (except for not having closed captions).

On the subject of Ruby and Rails, every time I learn something new about it I am usually more impressed about how clever and easy things are.

Overall, the courses are quite useful, but they don't really compare to the Software Engineering Course – which covers much more material and had actually challenging course work. However, it took me about 30 hours, while both of these took around 8 hours, so it is not really a fair comparison.

And I also learned some stuff on the Zombie courses that were not on the Software Engineering Course (including some new bits introduced in the latest versions of Rails).

Rails for Zombies Redux is a free course, so if you are interested in the topic it is a good place to start.

Categories
Book Review

Design Patterns Explained – Book Review

I read Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design – by Allan Shalloway, James R. Trott early this year.

Unfortunately, I forgot to review it till now, and I'd like to do so for the sake of completeness. Naturally, the book is no longer as fresh on my mind, so it will be a tad quicker than usual.

Overall, the book is good. I think I still prefer the original Design Patterns book, but it was much drier. This is on has slightly less information, but has some very good ideas on how to approach an analysis problem with design patterns in mind.

Recommended, specially if you couldn't get through the original Design Patterns. Otherwise it is a little redundant.