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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Kotlin for Java Developers by JetBrains

4.7
stars
2,022 ratings

About the Course

The Kotlin programming language is a modern language that gives you more power for your everyday tasks. Kotlin is concise, safe, pragmatic, and focused on interoperability with Java code. It can be used almost everywhere Java is used today: for server-side development, Android apps, and much more. Kotlin is 100% compatible with all existing Java frameworks, and has good tooling support. It’s a pragmatic language with a very low learning curve, and can be quickly grasped by Java developers. Kotlin code might be compiled not only to JVM bytecode but to JavaScript and Native code as well, but this course is focused on Kotlin/JVM. This course aims to share with you the power and the beauty of Kotlin. We'll have a basic overview of the language, as well as a discussion of many corner cases, especially concerning Java interoperability. The course is based on your Java experience; it shows the similarities between the two languages and focuses on what's going to be different. Note that this course won't cover the programming fundamentals. We'll discuss: basic syntax, nullability, functional programming with Kotlin, object-oriented programming with Kotlin, the power of the Kotlin standard library, and Java interoperability....

Top reviews

MA

Jun 28, 2019

Excellent course, packed with relevant content and useful hands on Kotlin exercises with great feedback based on Coursera provided unit tests. Looking forward to more Coursera courses from JetBrains.

SY

Feb 10, 2019

This course is a very comprehensive and detailed introduction to Kotlin. However, it would be even better if it could include the generics part which is the most difficult but quite frequently used.

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451 - 475 of 485 Reviews for Kotlin for Java Developers

By Antonio R

Dec 29, 2019

For people coming from a pure Java background, this course does a good job of covering quite a lot of topics playing to Kotlin's strengths and motivation for use.

One can see the instructors have quite a firm grasp on the overall knowledge domain (as expected given they are part of the team of language creators).

The text and speech of it does look like it requires a bit of a review, with the subtitles (I believe auto generated) got themselves in quite a bit of a tight spot, with multiple misses in words used which was case for quite a lot of replaying certain bits of video while trying to understand what was said.

Exercises wise, there was a hard balance struck there. Some of the exercises presented during the ongoing video presentation did a good job in exposing some of the functionalities that were being presented. Coming to programming assignments, however, this is a bit lost, with the emphasis being more on implementing the requested functionality with not much guidance provided on whether the correct language constructs are being applied, mainly towards the final two weeks of course. When a person has no firm grasp on these functionalities, it does serve to demotivate a bit.

By Eduardo S

Mar 29, 2020

While the content of the course goes into a lot of detail I found it a bit disappointing in terms of the questions asked in the lessons and the assignments. When covering the material, the questions asked most of the time aim very edge cases and don't add up to what's been learned. Sometimes it's difficult to follow the lesson, being a mixture of new concepts and the difficulty to understand the teacher. The last assignments are very hard, not because of the language itself but because we have to work out difficult algorithms that are not what we are learning. I think the questions and assignments should go hand in hand, and this fact makes it very hard to continue with the course and pass the assignments.

By George A

Mar 7, 2021

The content of the course is very good. It covers lots of interesting things. The fact that there is a comparison between Java and Kotlin is a plus. Mind you all, this course is not specific for Android developers - it covers a wider range of topics. That said, you can certainly benefit from it.

Why the 3 stars? I found it very difficult to engage and follow the course because of the instructor's accent. I had the auto generated subs on, but there are way too many mistakes in them. So, as an overall experience, it was really frustrating and it took me way more time and concentration as I had to stop the video again and again in order to understand what the instructor said.

By Julien L

Apr 7, 2019

Content is pretty good, but the English of the teacher could really be better. English not being my first language either, I understand how difficult making a course in English is. However, her accent is so strong that it makes the whole learning process much more difficult. I had to basically mute the author all the time and use subtitles to have a chance to follow.

Please use a native speaker to create those courses next time. The English of the lead of the language is perfect for example.

Other than that, the content of the course is pretty good, and I did learn stuff. So thanks a lot.

By Petr M

Feb 7, 2020

The course is quite good, but there is still something to improve, e.g.: lecturer's speech (sometimes really hard to understand), english subtitles in videos (there are major mistakes, that could confuse the listener - e.g. "enlightened" instead of "inlined", ...), no solutions for programming assignments in week5, and for last task in week4 (I'd like to know, if my solutions are principally good, or not - but unfortunately I'm missing feedback here).

Nevertheless, I can say, that after completing the course I know much more about Kotlin, than before.

By Erik K

Oct 19, 2021

The explanation is very good. After your work passes the unit tests, you get a useful and detailed official solution of the author. But only for 3 out of 5 weeks. For week 4 and 5 you don't get any feedback at all. And these are assignments on which Jetbrains estimates you to spend 5 hours on. I mentioned this 2 years ago on the forums, but no response from JetBrains. Otherwise I would've rated this course 5 stars. Btw I don't mind the Russian accent at all, it's very well presented. And I'm not an English nor Russian native.

By Patrick B

Dec 1, 2023

I am really mixed about how to review this material. The instructional videos were good, but sometimes the accent of the presenter made them hard to understand. The code assignments were good reinforcement, but many of them were poorly explained or required additional knowledge outside the scope of the assignment. In addition some of the assignments lack solution videos. In short, fine for a free course but not something I would ever recommend spending money on.

By Nicolas B N

Jan 23, 2019

The course material was great and the instructor very knowledgeable. My main pain point is the instructor's very thick accent. In my opinion, this course should be taught by someone who has a more "international" English. Having to decipher what the instructor is saying adds cognitive overhead to a subject-matter which already requires a lot of cognition.

By Petr B

Feb 22, 2019

Overall it was good, and also the information and assignments was Ok, but the accent of the speaker was annoying. Maybe it was not the accent, but the feel that the video is not properly prepared, cut, post processed without slips of the tongue and of course a lot of "under the hood" :D

By Daniel M

Nov 4, 2019

Explanations were great (if not a bit brief), but assignments were really extra complicated and at times, vaguely explained. Sometimes, it would take hours to understand things, only to have a different explanation in the forum and accomplish it in minutes.

By Nikita M

Mar 14, 2019

This course definitely will give you overview of Kotlin lang features (which are commonly looks like syntactic sugar, but unfortunately program assignments are to complicated.

Alson the course a lit bit outdated (no videos on coroutines, type aliases)

By Dawit A

Nov 19, 2018

The course content is very great. The teacher (Svetlana) is also very good as well. But I sometimes find it difficult to follow her sentences. I think it'd get better in time as she becomes more fluent in English.

By Frank L

May 24, 2020

Binged it on a weekend, that was a bit much, it's a lot of work, most of it is barely Kotlin related. Still, good content, and definitely helpful to immerse.

By Samer H

Aug 9, 2022

The presenter of the course needs to GREATLY improve her English (pronunciation, word/phrase order, intonation, etc.).

By Juan C M

Oct 18, 2020

All the content is amazing but sometimes is complicated to understand the instructor voice.

By Arthur V

Apr 26, 2022

Content is good but the homework assignments are awful and time consuming

By Tarun R

Jun 23, 2020

Improvement can be done on examples.

Except that everything was good.

By Балахонцев М

Jan 9, 2021

theory is great, but practice part is poor (especially last one)

By Manoj C

May 27, 2021

The accent of the tutor is not very understandable.

By Prayag

Nov 20, 2020

Very Hard Assignments

By Walentine B

Mar 7, 2024

There are few issues with this course: - first of all looks like authors have been stuck in 2014th when Java8 was introduces, and they have no idea that after that time a lot of new features became available in Java. So, everything they say - it is impossible to do in Java, actually already possible. - saying that kotlin is nice language, because it like Groovy syntax. If I want something like Groovy syntax, I'd rather use Groovy, not Kotlin - they bring with Kotlin a lot of syntax sugar (or sugar syntax), while most of them had a lot of side affects, which makes things even worse, than it was before. Just count how often teacher says this words during course: however, unexpected, tricky, try to avoid this, this is tricky, puzzler, confusing, not straightforward, etc... - teachers speech is unnatural, with lot of unexpected pauses and wrong accents, which makes hard to understand what teacher means, and follow teacher's thoughts. Either teacher don't understand what is talking about, or read the text which was never seen before the read... Anyway, it doesn't help to understand the material better. Summing up, let me rephrase teacher's words: Kotlin provides compromise between safety and inconvenience. Anyway, I like the materials, I like the exercises - it allowed to get familiar with what Kotlin is. Except, maybe, the last exercise: are you sure, guys, that implementing oddity on permutation algorithm is a good task to get into kotlin features?

By abic

Jan 16, 2021

The material, intention, and content of this course is very useful but the delivery mechanism was very unusable for me. It was difficult for me to follow the accent, also often the pacing. Would be really great if there was a non-video version of this course -- i.e., well organized/written text with code snippets (perhaps like a book or web-based tutorial). Then I could pace myself and focus/learn things better.

By DIWAAN C C S

Jun 10, 2020

Content of the course is good and the instructor is also good

But as a college student I couldn't understand most of the concepts

Also the assignments are not even understandable and my suggestion is that the assessment questions could be clear

It takes over 30 mins to actually understand the problem statement

Finally this course is not for begineers and also for java developers

I won't recommend this to others

By Siarhei K

Dec 1, 2018

The grader on 4th week was not providing clear messages about issue. Plus, the course covers only the basics. So, I've lost my interest to it.

By achraf

Sep 8, 2022

there is so much new information for beginners that needs to be more explaned and the videos are too short to expain complicated concepts