Ruby on Rails: An Introduction

Nobody said that this course and Web Development in general are easy... it's a demanding and challenging course...! And that's just fine!!!

I selected this course right after I completed the Coursera course "Web Application Development: Basic concepts" from the university of New Mexico, because of the Ruby on Rails I learned there... It seemed (and it was) the right path to go!

Ruby on Rails: An Introduction is the first course of the specialization and well... it's somewhat hard!
It was great for me, but it's pretty demanding and challenging for an introductory course.
The word "introduction" may be misleading but the one and two-star reviews are misleading as well, because the course IS NOT for beginners...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering, I've been a Linux user since 2009 and yet I spent much of my time troubleshooting and searching on stack overflow... (I completed the course in less than 10 days...)

I've read reviews from previous students and I agree that there could/should be an extra week or two for the Ruby language and syntax and/or split module 3 in half to have more time to absorb the tons of information and course material.

That being said, I found the course very well structured, the instructor was very helpful as he answered in every thread in the forum and the assignments, though challenging, were well documented. The only problem was with the last assignment and the food2fork API, as the service was down for a day or two and couldn't sign up for the API key...

As mentioned above by other reviewers, YES, testing with rspec was a huge bonus!
Application deployment on Heroku was another plus for the course!
Another plus for the lecture on the bundler and the gems!!!

Demanding and challenging but also a really great course!

P.S. When "rails s" fails, use "bunlde exec rails s".

In general I think the instructor is trying to tackle too much in 3 weeks. Given that this is the first run, many issues with the assignments arose. It required students to dive extensive into the discussion area to obtain clarity. Choice of variable names within the code presented in the lectures and assigments were not well thought out and led to some confusion.

I would imagine future offerings of this course would improve. A few suggestions:
1) More than one week should be spent on Ruby conventions and syntax.
2) Do live coding if possible, not static pictures of the code.
3) The introduction to MVC and rails should be given more examples, so that students truely understand how a Rails app functions. Only after this foundation would it see appropriate to be worrying about things like CSS, API's etc.
4) Perhaps the instructure could put together a simple API/database hosted online, say like a realestate inventory (pictures of house, cost of house, bedrooms, bathrooms, sqft, address, taxes etc.) Then keep using the same database/API for writing and expanding a rails app over a few weeks. This way the students can get a feel of how the MVC is integrated along with the syntax/semantics.
5) Lastly, the rspec statements are not particularly useful in identifying the failed test, please provide better descriptions.

This series of courses has the possibility to be quite good, after a few iterations. However, in it's current form, I feel the current iteration is likely to be a difficult journey.

The whole course is hastily put together. The lectures are especially terrible with the microphone so poorly placed you can loudly and clearly hear the bodily functions of the lecturer. Graded assignments lack any real direction and instead classmates who have suffered through them provided guidance in the discussion forums.

There is a lot of sample code shown in the lectures. For the first week this is nicely available for download, broken up by lecture. After the first week the instructors got lazy and did not make it available at all. Students are left having to rewatch the lectures just view screen shots of code specifics.

Honestly, this is a great example of the reasoning, "Those who can do, those who can't teach." This instructor clearly understands the material so poorly, that he can't even teach it.

When I started this sequence of courses, I noticed there were several instructors. I completed it hoping that someone else would be responsible for the next in the series. Unfortunately the second course is with the same instructor and I can't possibly torture myself listening to him for another several weeks.

The lectures are terrible. They are all the same style with the instructor droning on about topics that are often grouped together without being related. Examples are few and far between and don't do nearly enough to actually demonstrate what is being spoken about.

The lectures are also very poorly put together. The instructor clearly did not prepare what he was going to say and is obviously winging it while recording the video.

Worst is that the lectures are very difficult to watch. The instructor's tone will quickly drive you to boredom. If you can stick through the lectures you have to deal with the instructor's constant problem with excess saliva smacking around in his mouth as he talks. It is distracting at best can completely disgusting at worst.

The assignments are horribly written and nearly impossible to follow. Most discussions in the forums were related to try to understand what was being asked, and even the assistants couldn't clarify. Instead it was a bunch of trial and error. Eventually people were able to figure it out and guide the rest of the class.

I am going to do my review in modules and i will try to cover both bad things and good things.

First Module: In my opinion if someone is not going for the full 6 courses or at least for several courses it is an overkill to spend 1 of the 3 weeks with just setup info . I would like to maybe see a ruby introduction here and a very small assigment even if it was ungraded or something like that. Nevertheless the modules were very informational and during the setup you can catch some pretty significant tricks/practices at least for the linux setup process that i went through.

Second Module: Okay they basically unload the ruby language on you in a single module with a kinda hard assigment in the end that fully uses the concepts of Classes etc.I am not really sure that someone who has not come across the concepts before can really cope with it but it was interesting and the fact that they do real testing with rspec here and they let you see the way tests work eventually after all said and done will lead to a well structured program and i am sure that someone can learn a lot from this.I for sure did.

Third Module: Ruby on Rails .This is what we all signed up for anyway.This course leads to a very nice assigment that is pretty much a sneak peak to how fun ruby on rails can be.They introduce you into the concepts of api,how to use additional gems and how to basically navigate through your basic rails application and in the end you have a pretty cool app deployed on the web .All these while they keep working with rspec to do testing of the application.

To sum up this was not a bad course by any means.The teacher was very good and i personally like the no crap straight into the subject approach that he used. I really feel this could/should be a 4 module course instead of 3.They could either go a bit slower with ruby with more assigments or lean a bit heavier on rails introduction. After having finished the second course as well and played with other sources i can't stress enough that the fact they introduce testing to the students from their very first assigment and stick with it all the way through is a huge bonus for me. Also i think that the suggested 2-3 hours a week workload is an understatement at least for beginners.

The course was a bit tougher than expected from the description. The 2-3 hour per week estimate was on the low side of realistic. It seems like this was the beta-offering of the 1st course in the series, as there were a few glitches to be worked out (namely the Week 2 assignment documentation discrepancies that caused much head-pounding frustration!). Hopefully the attention to detail by the staff improves for the future courses.

The students and staff that contributed help via the forum were as much responsible for my successful completion as the instructor videos. At times, the videos didn't explain the concepts as fully as I'd have liked, however I actually preferred it this way. I'd rather go track down supplemental info if I need it rather than be subjected to things I already know.

I intend to complete the specialization.

I did complete the course and am fairly satisfied with what I learnt. However, there is a whole slew of improvements that could have been made. I mean, it cost each person $75 and there were over 500 students enrolled. The least they could have done was get some descent TA to help out with the issues the students had. The few students who attempted to do the assignments early deserve to get paid more than the TA's for doing their job. And, somebody please ask the instructor not to wear his microphone so close to his mouth. It was horrible to hear non-stop slurping. The lectures did feel rushed towards the end of each module. I probably spent 1/4 of the time on goggle trying to fill in the missing information to successfully complete the requirements.

I didnt like that there wasnt a depth of video tutorials showing techniques. The videos seemed out of order. Parsing user input which i believe was the variable q was not well explained.

The forums did give answers and there was a TA that was very good. However, its not a good thing that so much discussions were necessary its like a catch 22 to have a good TA there must have been material not covered. Unless it was planned to use forums and TA for learning mechanism.

I thought the directions on the assignment were awefully written. They obviously came from a foreign source. I would suggest having an american rewrite the directions. just to standardize the bit because foreign english is a bit difficult even for the foreigners who arent that type of foreign like maybe someone from eastern europe has ok english but its got some errors it probably more difficult for asian to comprehend. So if you have american do the english it should be equal to the asian and eastern european.

rapid protoyping was ok... i think the concept of github was good but it crammed into the class. I was never able to make use of the revision capabilities in git. IE force students to write a version save it edit one line save it and then see how ghithub can help with the database of revisions.

I gave two stars because most of the work was like busy work and frustration trying to get the points or credit for the assignment. Not much was learned. There was alot of material in short time. I didnt get to use heroku to actually deploy to web. that was a plus concept mentioning heorku and the rapid prototyping thing.

Mostly terrible course. This course gives Johns Hopkins and online courses in general a bad name. The course is in need of an update or new version. Most of the material is older or out of date. Many examples no longer work. You will have to install older versions of the tools needed to do the work. Little to no responses for recent issues on the message boards, so help is few and far between.

The course is broken up into 3 "weeks".
- The first week is a joke, waste of time.
- The second week should really be 2 different weeks. The assignment is missing at least 30% of the material needed to successfully complete it. Even then, you will have to fight with RSPEC and "Test Driven Design" to get the assignment to work correctly. Students have to dig through the old message board for answers to issues that come up, along with using a lot of stack-exchange.
- The examples in Week 3 can no longer be followed due to Coursera changes. You have to dig into Helpers to figure out how to meet several of the requirements. This assignment is definitely dependent on older versions of code. If using any new version of ruby or rails, you will have to modify multiple items in your files/system to get the grader to work.

The professor, seems fine, but definitely can be annoying. If anyone has an issue with how people sound over audio, then his issues will cause people to cringe or grossed out. Not the professor's fault, just something that can cause issues for a lot of people.

This course was really difficult from a true beginner perspective. I knew HTML and CSS going into this course and had practiced some Ruby on CodeAcademy and was loving it so I decided to take this course based on the syllabus. It seemed like a good fit at first but the lecturer really didn't explain things very well. I had to keep pausing and googling things and I'd have to re-read the examples 100 times. For the assignments he assumes a lot of knowledge on forking and cloning that someone with my experience didn't really have.

I'm still happy I took the course because struggling through it I really did learn quite a bit but I don't know that I learned more than I would have had I continued with CodeAcademy for free. And CodeAcademy explains things really well. Ultimately I'm taking any Ruby and Rails courses I can and just repeating everything until it's burned in my brain so I guess this helped with that. I'm a few weeks behind, still working on this class but I do plan to finish it.

I noticed a lot of people had a lot of trouble trying to complete the course and for sure the unreal 2-3h/week suggested to accomplish the assignments were the reason for so many people to enroll and then fail.

But taking in consideration that the specialization specifies its difficulty level as "Intermediate Specialization. Some related experience required" I think it was pretty accurate.

If you have no experience at all you shouldn't take this course. Even if you come from a different development environment it might be really difficult to get up to speed when you have so many tools and concepts (ruby, rails, git, heroku, html, css, javascript, phantom, rvm, rbenv, gems, etc.) to learn about in such a few time.

Well, from my point of view it was a good initial course which took into consideration core tools that are going to be used in following courses.

But, what I didn't like at all were the assignment instructions. In my opinion they were really messy and hard to understand, missing relevant information and even requesting different things than what was evaluated/tested to assign the scores.

This was an amazing course. It's only 3 weeks long but it gives you the opportunity to get a good basis on ruby and rails, as well as other useful tools that are used, such as GIT, RSpec and HTTParty. I found the first coding assignment to be particularly challenging. The instructions for the second one were more detailed and therefore you didn't have to do so much on your own. The only thing that wasn't great about this course was uploading the solutions to the coding assignments, because instructions weren't completely clear. And since it was graded automatically, if you didn't upload the exact file or directory that was expected, you would get a score of 0, which wasn't a big deal given that you have multiple submissions, but it was pretty upsetting.