Tag: Course Review

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Developing Android Apps – Course Review

Developing Android Apps is a course by Google on Udacity that covers a lot of what you need to know to start developing for Android on Android Studio.

I took the course several months ago, but procrastinated writing about till now (I really wanted to go through my review backlog before New Years). I did the free version of the course – not because it was expensive, but the extra benefit seemed negligible for me and I was afraid that I might have to drop out due to my very poor Java skills (not an actual problem).

Thus, my impressions are definitely fuzzier than they should be.

The course was pretty good. Thankfully, I didn't start it just as it was released, but rather like a month after. So a lot of the initial problems were taken care of. Still, a lot of the time you'd have to read the instructor notes, and ignore most of the video as it was just plain wrong.

The course starts at installing Android Studio and setting up your Android device, all the way to developing a weather app that uses best practices to cache and download its data.

As an aside, I really enjoyed using Android Studio, despite some minor problems (including a time where it simply started complaining about nonsensical problems with my code until I forced a rebuild).

Overall, recommended.

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Product Review

How to Create a Brilliant 3D Demo Video for Your Business – Course Review

How to Create a Brilliant 3D Demo Video for Your Business, by David Hawkins, covers all you need to know to make your own 3D animated video about your product or service.

Course Sections

  • Script writing
  • Storyboarding
  • Illustration
  • Animation
  • Voiceover
  • Sound Effects
  • Editing
  • Marketing/PR

Conclusion

The course is taught using several Adobe products (such as Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, etc), all of which have a 30-day trial available.

Included with the course are several files with many interactive PDF templates as well as several illustrations and projects.

If you are in a hurry, you will probably be happy to know that I could speed up the videos in Udemy (1.25, 1.5, 1.7 or 2.0). 1.5X is very watchable for me.

The 3D animation part is really something that can give an edge for your video.

Overall, the course is worth it if you can get a discount.

There is a very nice sale on Bits Du Jour for US$49 instead of US$347.

[big_button color=”blue” url=”http://stgsys.net/3ddemocourse” desc=””]Get the course for US$49[/big_button]

Check the video that is used as an example in the course below:

 

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Product Review

App Making: Designing & Marketing Successful Apps – Guide Review

App Making: Designing & Marketing Successful Apps is a guide by Jeremy Olson. Jeremy is the founder of Tapity, which has a few well know apps that were featured by Apple as well as covered by the press.

I got the complete package (US$150 with the launch and App Design guide buyer discount). There are also other cheaper packages available.

The guide is hosted in guides.co. They don't allow for offline viewing, but it was quite comfortable to view on a tablet. The videos are placed on pages, which I believe is a better choice than many similar sites because it is easier to just display other resources, tips, action points and relevant screens in place.

They also have one very interesting feature – you can comment on each lesson, and it can be public or just readable for the author. So there is a mini-forum available on every topic. Personally I posted a question and got a response from the author very fast.

One complaint I have is that you have to log on a lot on the site – sometimes more than once a day. And they use a dual page login system that neither Chrome nor Safari (iPad) can just login directly.

Videos are mostly from a workshop, and quality is OK, although audio is sometimes a little hard to hear. Sometimes things are described (such as interactions on apps) instead of shown, which is somewhat frustrating.

It is important to note that while a lot of what is mentioned will apply to other platforms, the details are mostly focused on iOS and Apple.

The content starts with how to create and validate your app idea, and ways to brainstorm features so that you get a crisp design with a coherent, simple purpose.

There is some generic as well as useful advice on Interaction Design, prototyping and usability testing.

The Visual Design section is mostly simple principles (using proximity, alignment, contrast)but has some interesting tips, including icon design for iOS7 and 8.

There is a brief section on actually building your app, with an analysis of pros and cons of doing a native app vs a web based one, and a general idea of how much an app will supposedly cost.

What is probably the most interesting section is Marketing, which covers how to build relations with members of the press and app community, and how to pitch your app – which is similar to what I have heard elsewhere and seems like great advice.

There are some resources included, such as XLS checklists that you can fill in , pitch template and press lists, as well as market analysis and strategic design for Languages that are somewhat useful. Note that not all editions include this.

The complete package also includes the complete interviews with app developers, member of the press and more, that are included partly in the middle of the video part of the course. To be sincere, I didn't get around to watching them yet – a transcript would be great, as some were taken outside and the wind noise can make it very hard to hear (also, I'm a speed reader and a transcript takes a fraction of the time of a video).

The App Design Handbook – iOS7 edition by Nathan Barry and Jeremy Olson is also included in the complete version. This mostly covers the same material, but the sections on choosing controls for your apps, as well as how to use the iOS7 style are quite useful.There are more details in the icon design area, too.

Overall, I think it is a good investment if you are serious about creating apps. It is a little expensive without the discounts, though.

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Product Review

Web Development CS253 – Course Review

What it covers

Web Development CS253 is taught at Udacity, and has a free version and a US$150 version – which has in-class projects, coaching and code reviews, as well as a verified certificate.

The course covers all basics on web development, and you will develop a very simple blog and a wiki by the end.
It uses Python and Google App Engine, which I think are excellent choices for a course and require relatively little setup.

The teacher is Steve Huffman, which is one of co-founders of reddit. It is nice to have a teacher with such experience, although he does warn you several times that Google App Engine is new to him.

The official level of the course is Intermediate, which assumes that you can already program in Python.

I have done a lot of web development, but mostly way back (1999-2002), using Delphi CGI, which is fairly outdated. I am planning on doing an overhaul on some of the systems in my site, and the course seemed like it would be useful.

How the course works

The course, as usual for Udacity, is a series of videos on YouTube (almost always with subtitles available), with quizzes in the middle. Some quizzes are simple multiple-choice, and same use an online Python IDE where you can type, try your solutions and submit them.

You also have separate homeworks, which technically can be built on any web development language you want – all tests are made by accessing the URL you specify. The course is all taught using Google App Engine and Python, though.

Content

The first part assumes that you have no HTML or server practice. You can skip a whole lot if you already do.
Soon you will write actual simple apps, use databases, add access control, use JSON and use Memcached to allow for much larger scale sites.
There is some very interesting coverage on how things are scaled on reddit and Udacity itself.

Python

I have to say that I didn't like the idea of a language with significant whitespace. But having used Python in this course and others, I have come to really appreciate how clean it looks. It is also quite easy to use for web development, and I understand it has nice frameworks (such as django).

Google App Engine

Google App Engine is an interesting option for hosting that many large companies use. The big advantage is that scaling is much easier, specially if you don't have experience with setting up multiple servers and doing load balancing on bigger loads. It can do a lot of that automatically. And a big advantage for the course as well as trying it out is that it is free up to a certain point – which you are totally not going to reach at this course.

It has improved a lot over the years and now supports several languages, instead of just Python as when it started. There are also a whole bunch of services you can use, but you always have to be careful because everything comes at a literal cost.

You still have to take care not to be bitten by eventual consistency problems, and I have noticed wild speed differences in response time, including responses freezing for more than a minute while the server created an index for a datastore with a couple of dozen entries (!).

Homework Checking

I had some trouble with the homework checking, and the forums are full of similar complaints. Basically, sometimes the checker will just say the things didn't work, making it a major problem to figure out what you did wrong. In some cases, simply resubmitting after an error got a version accepted.

On some other cases, the system pointed out what it tested and failed, and then it was easy to correct.

Conclusions

I thought this was useful, and it was interesting to see how CGIs work on Python and Google App Engine. The course took me about 30 hours, including all videos and homework.

If you don't have web development experience or if you are interested in learning Python or how to use Google App Engine, that feels like time well spent. I am not sure if the paid version would be worth it for me – I don't really have any use for the certificate at this point, but the in-class projects and code reviews sound like they might be useful.

I am still not sure if I am going with Ruby on Rails for my site backend or Python, though. 🙂

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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.

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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.

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Product Review

Guest Blogging Blueprint – Course Review

Guest Blogging Blueprint, by Joel Widmer, is a course that covers pretty much all you'd need to know to start guest blogging.

It goes from why, through searching for adequate blogs, to writing and promoting your guest blog posts.

Why?

The reason most people have to want to guest blog is simple: links. Most blogs you'd want to post in are going to give you a link or two in your post, which can really improve your ranking on search engines and give you traffic.

The course also mentions some other reasons:

  • Increase your credibility, or that of your brand
  • Get targeted traffic from those blog readers – for sales, awareness or to build and e-mail list
  • Promoting a product
  • Getting job offers

There are many more on the course, but these are probably enough to get anyone interested in being a guest blogger.

Content

The course covers:

  • Goals
  • How to find Search keywords – that influences the blogs you will find
  • How to find blogs – some nice advice, and plenty of search engine tricks to help you find useful blogs
  • How to qualify the blogs you found – no point in getting a blog post on worthless blogs!
  • Choosing your topic – covers idea generation, how to see and match the tone of the blog, etc
  • How to Pitch your post to the blog – ideas on how to get the blog to accept your blog post, includes e-mail templates
  • Promoting your post – after you get your post in, it is useful to make it as visible as possible, and this include some techniques.

Conclusion

The course took me about 2.5 hours to conclude (I didn't actually do the exercises – but you probably should!), and it covers pretty much everything you'd want to know to start guest blogging.

There are also PDFs with e-mail templates, and the videos are downloadable – great if you want to watch on a tablet or cell phone.

Guest blogging Blueprint is money and time well spent if you are interested in the subject (which you probably should be, given the free traffic you can get!). Recommended.

I was able to get my readers a 50% discount coupon. At this price point (US$14!) the course is really a great deal.

Get Guest Blogging Blueprint – 50% off

Note: I got a free review copy of the course from the author. This didn't change this review in any way, however.

 

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Product Review

Sleep Hacking: Course Review

Sleep Hacking 101: Have more Energy spend less time in bed is a course on Udemy on how to optimize your sleep.

The idea of the course is that there are practices you can take that can enable you to sleep less and still have more energy.

The course consists mostly of videos (with a few PDFs with mostly the same content and a Excel file for you to work on your habits), and took me about 2 hours to watch, while writing notes.

What it covers is the nature of sleep, and what you can do to improve yours, such as:

  • Get more light in the day, specially right after you wake up, and avoid it before sleep and if you wake up during sleep
  • Avoid too much coffee, and also food and drinks near your bed time
  • Minor advice on sleep monitors and smart wake alarm such as the Zeo (which I understand is no longer available); I would really like to have seen more on this area, specially reviews of products that are still available
  • Some suggestions on what to do before sleep
  • Suggestions on naps, which mostly is that they are useful and that they should be short enough that you don't enter deep sleep and wake up groggy

Overall, I'd say that the course does have some useful advice, although I already heard almost everything on the course before. I feel I wasn't taking enough natural light during the day, though, and following the course advice already helped a bit. It was good to be reminded of some of the other stuff, which I hadn't forgotten but started ignoring.

What remained was enough for the price I paid, but if I had paid full price (US$49 right now) I might have asked for a refund. If you get a nice discount, it is worth it.

Update (19/Nov/2013): I asked the course's author (Scott Britton) for a discount for my blog readers. And he offered a 100% discount! So you can get the course for free! Considering this I have changed my rating from 3 to 5 stars.

[button link=”http://stgsys.net/sleep” window=”yes”]Get the Course for Free[/button]

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Data Analysis Course – Course Review

I took the Data Analysis course, by Jeff Leek, on Coursera some time ago.

The course covers how to do data analysis. The useful parts if you are not a data analyst or planning on becoming one, is that you learn some statistics, how to explore data and see correlations, and also how to use R, which is an interesting language for statistics. It is also fairly easy to use for graphs, and you can achieve quite a lot with very little code.

The course is mostly in video, and you have a weekly quizzes as well as 2 data analyses that you have to make.

It took me about 23 hours to complete the course, including quizzes and data analyses.

Overall I found the course to be good, although I found some of the later quizzes to be a little hard. I think it could have used more practical exercises and quizzes, and some of the later classes could be more clear.

Recommended if you are interested in the area.

Don't have a lot of time? Some of what is covered here is also in Visualize This – and even if you end up taking the course, you will probably be able to use some of what you learned in the book.