"Ruby Programming from Scratch - Beginner and Advanced" by EduCBA IT Academy
I'm cheating somewhat in reviewing this Udemy course, because I haven't finished it. And I doubt that I ever will. I finally realised I was falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy and gave up.
That was in Lecture 78 (of 175), in which our tutor's uninspiring delivery is all but drowned out by what could be someone chasing electric cabling into a wall with a mallet and bolster. (Or - for a more attractive image - perhaps chiseling out a piece of fine marble sculpture.)
The list price for this course on Udemy is a jaw-dropping £233 (That's right - two hundred and thirty-three) which I imagine must make it one of the most expensive courses on the site.
As I said in an earlier post, you should never pay full price for a course on Udemy*. I paid $10 for this one, but regret even that. $10 seems like more than the creators spent on putting the course together.
Format
The format of the course (unless it changes in the sections I haven't watched) is to go through elements of Ruby, define them, and give a basic example of the relevant syntax.
There is no encouragement for you to try out the constructs for yourself: no exercises, or project running through the course.
I suppose it could serve as a look-up for a particular syntax with an example of its' use. But then you could just look up the ruby documentation yourself.
The presentation is flat and uninspiring. Worse, it seems to have been put together with contempt for the student.
Lazily produced
Aside from visible basic spelling errors on the site like those above, the actual video content is poorly and lazily produced.
For example, within a single video lecture we start with a discussion of the second point on a slide (string interpolation), before the video jump-cuts back to the first point on the slide (explaining what a string is). Clearly wrongly edited.
It gets worse in the section on comparison operators.
It seems odd that the first lecture in that section launches into discussing the second operator (!=) in a table of them. "What about the first one?", you think. Maybe == is so obvious it doesn't need explaining?
But, no, after a couple of minutes the video jump-cuts back to give a general introduction to the table we've already been looking at.... and describe the == operator. And at 5 mins 40 in the same video we jump again to what was obviously meant to be the start of the lecture - with a basic definition of what a comparison operator is.
All confusing enough, but it gets worse as the next video explains the != operator to us again as if we'd never seen it before.
Quality control
I can only conclude that they didn't bother to make even basic checks of the course content before publishing it. And Udemy clearly don't practice any quality control themselves. I should have followed my own advice.
Before long, even the small things about this course were getting on my nerves.
Like the poor audio with various distracting background noises.
And that every time the tutor wants to run one of his ruby files we have to watch him open a command prompt and "cd" four times to get to his working directory. If you can't organise your presentation a bit better, why not at least cd once with the full path?!
*takes deep breath*
There are, of course, a number of alternative Ruby courses on Udemy. A couple which I've tried and would rate higher than this one are:
Wait for the $10 per course offers, though!
*Except Alan Richardson's magnificent WebDriver course, but even that can be taken outside Udemy here.
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