Pluralsight’s #FREEapril courses overview
#FREEapril means free access to Pluralsight’s huge catalogue of courses for a whole month. It’s indeed a great occasion to improve skills, but also take a hands-on insight on Pluralsight’s offer.
Indeed, I did it and want to share my opinion on courses I’ve taken. My goal was to make it short and informative and I hope I’ve managed to do so. Let’s get straight to it!
AWS Developer: The Big Picture by Ryan Lewis
Pros:
:) clear voice and narration
:) flawlessly introduces to the landscape of AWS and it’s most popular, mostly used services
:) in the last module, shows various ways of accessing AWS
Cons:
None! I simply get what I came for :)
Overall rating: 5/5
AWS Developer: Getting Started by Ryan Lewis
Pros:
:) clear voice and narration
:) goes through most popular AWS services, like IAM (roles management), EC2 (VMs), S3 (massive storage), DynamoDB and RDS (NoSQL and SQL databases respectively), Elastic Beanstalk (automated environment setup)
:) …and does that as I’d expect: short theoretical introduction followed by full demo (coding and respective AWS actions)
:) …and it’s done in the context of pizza app - I don’t like pizza that much, but it’s coherent and what’s most important, it’s a full path from nothing to AWS powered solution
Cons:
None! I simply get what I came for :)
Overall rating: 5/5
Microservices: The Big Picture by Antonio Goncalves
Pros:
:) nicely walks through the microservices landscape
:) (for business people) it’s very lightweight on the technical side, covering topics like organization-relevance, team, the importance of CI/CD etc.
Cons:
:( (for technical people) as mentioned above, it’ll be boring for most of you
:( a little accent make it hard to play it on speeds above 1.3x
**Overall rating (technical people) : 3/5
Overall rating (business people): 5/5**
Microservices: Getting Started by Floyd May
Pros:
:) quite detailed, helicopter view on microservices landscape, heavily focused on technical aspects - it’s like a checklist for launching microservices architecture based project :)
:) clear voice and narration
:) it’s like Sam Newman’s „Building Microservices” distilled - and that’s a huge plus!
Cons:
:( if you’re looking for coding, it’s not for you - this is typical architectural-level course
Overall rating: 5/5
Making Your Java Code More Object-oriented by Zoran Horvat
Pros:
:) here comes the greatest discovery of my #FREEapril with Pluralsight - under such indistinctive title comes a tremendous course!
:) this is truly a potion of coding knowledge: it begins with turning your view of OOP upside-down by emphasizing the crucial role of polymorphism, then it applies this view to solve if-else branching issues, then it introduces basic DDD building blocks like Value Objects, then a useful design pattern of special case object, to finish with some functional programming
:) Zoran does live coding and describes the most important aspects of introduced code in detail, using some graphical tools, which makes it easy to follow him and understand both the issue and solution
:) every problem is clearly stated at first, which makes you understand why you need such powerful technics, even if the original code is working as expected (for now)
:) to say that narration is great would be undervalue - it’s truly magnificent, both in case of scenario and the amount of passion in Zoran’s voice
:) this course is dedicated to avoiding branching, widely speaking
:) it’s a must for those of you, who have not yet witnessed the power of DDD and (real) functional programming, not to mention (real) OOP
Cons:
Zoran really nailed it with this course. I couldn’t imagine anything better, really.
Overall rating: 5/5 + my recommendation
Mastering Object-oriented Programming in Java by Zoran Horvat
Pros:
:) this course is the follow up to the one described above and the same pros in terms of narration, live coding, explanations, passion and dedication of the author applies here
:) in this course, functional programming is even more emphasized, because every piece of code (after refactoring) is functional
:) in terms of DDD, author introduces the concept of Domain-Specific Language (DSL) and applies it to the chosen problem
:) in terms of Design Patterns, Rule Objects and their chains are introduced
:) the last module of the course is truly remarkable - the author turns the code, which is as procedural as possible (step-based algorithm for calculating check number), into beautiful, object-oriented masterpiece, which is highly maintainable and expressive. By doing so, he proves that the techniques he taught us, knows no limits when it comes to applying them. Astonishing!
Cons:
Once again, this course surpassed my expectations.
Overall rating: 5/5 + my recommendation
Applying Functional Programming Techniques in Java by Esteban Herrera
Pros:
Sorry, I couldn’t find any reason why to take up this course, but please take into account that I haven’t finished it (details below).
Cons:
:( although the author states that the course won’t dig deep into mathematics, it’s FULL of it. It’s not that I don’t like math (I love it), but learning mathematical transformations with equations is not what I came for by picking up course entitled like so
:( as for the fourth out of total eight modules of this course (yes, this was the only course that I dropped before even finishing it - which somewhat speaks for itself), around 80% of code is shown on the slides, not IDE, not to mention total lack of live coding
:( author has very strong accent, which made it hard for me to watch the course without the captions and very monotonic narration, which resembles of reading with constant speed
Overall rating: 1/5
TDD with JUnit 5 by Catalin Tudose
Pros:
:) useful for those new to JUnit 5, as author shows some of the most common features (I especially like the proposition to build the tests narration with @Nested and @DisplayName annotations) - but to be honest, you’ll learn more from the excellent, official JUnit 5 User Guide
:) easily understandable narration
:) measuring and improving code coverage with JaCoCo
Cons:
:( author does not teach the proper TDD approach - I know it’s for newcomers, but hey, TDD is not like „write method with dummy body, then supply test for this method, and then implement the method body” but rather „write down the test case, create methods unveiled in this test, get red, implement them, get green” - to be honest, this is the biggest flow in this course, as it targets TDD. What’s more the approach taken by the author, that is copy-pasting code instead of live coding, does not help, as TDD is a living process
:( mocking with Mockito was very poorly introduced (namely, two methods were introduced: when…thenReturn and verify plus the concept of a Spy). It was done to the extend that the mocked database was… pure Java-based. So it was like mocking a mock ;)
Overall rating: 2/5
To sum up, Pluralsight’s #FREEapril initiative was a great opportunity for me to take a look at their huge courses offer. In general, their quality is much higher than what you can get e.g. on Udemy. Pluralsight courses are rather short (average duration is around 3 hours) and focused on specific topic - both are great. In case of CS education though, I prefer mixture of video lectures (which Pluralsight’s courses consists of only) and self-paced exercises, something you can get on Udacity for example. Never the less, if you’re up to learn something new and specific, Pluralsight is definitely the place to check out.
Leave a comment