I recently finished Coursera’s Web Application Architectures course. Well, not technically “finished” since the course is scheduled to end on September 22nd, but I’m done with the quizzes and programming assignments, so I believe I’m “done.” Just waiting for my final grade. I think that’s how it works, right? They wait until the deadline before assigning the grades? If not, I should probably go figure out how to find my grade. Anyways…

The reason I took this course was because web application development seems to be where my career is going, and I didn’t focus on it (or anything) during my college education. Also, because the course uses Ruby on Rails, that my current job requires but I’ve never previously used.

The instructor for the course is Greg Heileman of University of New Mexico. I found the lectures to be enjoyable. The course is divided into 6 modules, each with around 6 to 8 lectures. There are quizzes every 2 to 3 lectures, and 4 programming assignments overall. In retrospect, I probably should have chosen a course of a higher difficulty level. That’s probably why I finished the course much earlier than its schedule. There weren’t a lot of programming involved; at least not as much as I expected. The course provides information on why Ruby on Rails is good for web applications and the basics of MVC design pattern. The “finished” blog application created for the class is available on my Bitbucket. I thought I’d work on it some more, especially in the View part, when I get the chance.

In any case, I think the course itself was fine. There were a few mistakes in the video lectures, ie. a section that’s supposed to be from another lecture was inserted in the middle of the wrong video. The most annoying mistake I found was in one of the quizzes, where it asked for a line of code, and it only accepts single quotes (') but not double quotes (") when it should have accepted both.

I’m currently looking for other courses I could take. Haven’t found any I’m interested in yet on Coursera, so I’m also browsing other online courses websites, preferably a more in depth Ruby on Rails course.