For those considering taking the MongoDB using the MEAN stack course on edX by MongoDB university I’ve provided my review of the course having just completed it. This is a copy of what I posted on the course’s forum.
Folks, having just completed this course (and shared the certificate on LinkedIn) I thought I’d offer my thoughts on what this course offers and what it does not.
- The most valuable thing I got from this course was to see how all the moving parts – libraries (e.g. node modules including express), frameworks (Angular, Ionic), build systems (gulp, grunt) and test libraries (karma) are used by professional developers to create web apps.
- The videos move at a rapid pace – I had to rewatch each one/go back to prior chapters to get a feel for what Mr Karpov was trying to get across – I thought this was good for giving you a flavour of the technology. This does mean that the 2hr/chapter isn’t realistic, I’d say it’s more like at least 4hrs per chapter.
- Having said that, you will clearly understand how to build a rest api to talk to your mongodb database, this was one of the big goals of the course and I think it was explained well.
Now for the things which the course doesn’t do:
- If you’re a beginner you might get lost when you get onto the latter chapters – Angular and Ionic – that’s because they’re too big a topic to cover within this introductory course.
- Incomplete/inconsistent code examples. The latter chapters have the issue of complete code (e.g. css files), directories not matching those shown in video causing confusion. These have been raised in the discussion so hopefully you can read the comments and solve the shortcomings or the course is updated.
So how will this course help me? I plan to create several web applications to learn technologies such as MEAN, this course will no doubt help me setup the backend (database, rest apis etc.) but also serve as a point of reference (e.g. “Oh I know what I could use to solve this problem”).
I hope you enjoy the course,
Kunal