Learner Reviews & Feedback for Ruby on Rails: An Introduction by Johns Hopkins University
About the Course
Top reviews
I have played around with Ruby on Rails before but this course really helped me understand the nots and bolts. It is worth replicating all the examples shown in the videos to get a good understanding,
One of the most challenging things I've ever done.\n\nThe course goes from zero to web deploy in 3 weeks and there are more to enjoy, discover and learn....\n\nTry it, I't's a no-return voyage
476 - 500 of 554 Reviews for Ruby on Rails: An Introduction
By Katelynne E
•This is not a beginner course. Lecture material does not support nor match the difficulty of the assignments.
By Michael R
•Assignment grading had a lot of technical hurdles. Content on Ruby was solid. Rails coverage was very basic.
By Ali S
•Compared to other courses I have completed on Coursera, this is one of the most confusing ones so far
By Taha A
•Very outdated course. Had to do so many hacks to complete all the assignments and run the examples.
By Daniel B d A
•The course is great for a first view of Web Development, but It should have more detailed content.
By Dhaval T
•Could've been much more clear with the examples if there were some loads of practice problems
By Marcel B
•Uses outdated Ruby version. Assignments rely on third-party APIs that have been shutdown.
By MD M R
•Lectures are backdated. faced a lot of issues .They should upgrade the whole course
By Xianglong W
•Lectures are really dull and boring compared to other coursed I have had.
By Miguel R T
•It's outdated, but the theory behind the course has been valuable to me.
By Raul C M
•I struggle sometimes with tests. But after all everything when was good
By E B
•A handful of the examples in this course are outdated and do not work.
By Eduardo C
•Me gustaria que fuese mas interactivo al momento de explicar el codigo
By Frederick J
•This is a good course. A thorough introduction to ruby on rails.
By Kareem E
•The final module is vague , but the course is nice as a whole
By David P
•A bit out of date, should have a module to install rvm.
By Maxine
•Very difficult to follow if you are not a programmer.
By Daniel H G
•it's ok. i would love more practical examples.
By Alexander K
•relatively good course, but has some issues
By Dinh T L H
•The voice is not good!
By De A D
•Needs to be updated.
By Nabil A B G
•very short course.
By Deleted A
•Good course.
By 에스더 이
•3
By Nicholas K
•Unfortunately as a course designed to teach Rails, it is poorly paced and has a few issues. The course content is spread out over three weeks as follows...
Week 1 they go over setting up a Ruby on Rails development environment, which was fine. They also went over Git and Github. While you can access all of the course content on Github, you are never actually required to use Git for any of the work in the course, and it only shows up as a few questions on the only quiz in the course.
Week 2 they cover Ruby programming and syntax. There are a lot of different sources where you can find tutorials and such for learning a new language, and in this course the material was... good enough. They also offered a number of practice assignments with self grading capability which is a nice feature.
The graded programming assignment for week 2 gives a lot of information about how to set up your environment and steps/commenting to assist building out your code. However there were a few requirements for the graded portion of the assignment that they don't even tell you about (expected return values under certain situations) until you actually run the grader. They weren't difficult but their reasoning were never explained in the course and it made the code a little more awkward than it needed be to pass.
Week 3 is where the major pacing problems occur. There are a number of very broad stroke videos on Rails, as well as several brief videos covering a number of third party libraries or tools sometimes required to build Rail apps. A lot of the content they cover isn't even utilized in the assignments of the course.
The week 3 assignment instructions are actually incomplete. They tell you a number of pre-required packages you have to install, including ones you had installed from previous assignments, but they leave out others you will need and leave several development environment issues you end up having to work out on your own.
And where as the week 2 assignment was almost overly hand-holdy on showing you where in a ruby file structure to implement your code, week 3 hardly offers any guidance on where or how to implement your Rails structure. The broad stroke videos from week 3 kind of give you an idea as to what each piece of code is doing if your working from a template, but the assignment feels obfuscated when trying to build it from scratch.
A major issue also comes from a third party website they require for completion of the assignment (and that requires separate registration to use). During several periods, over multiple sessions of the course, the third party site went down and was unavailable for as long as 48 hours at a time; during which it was impossible to properly run or debug the assignment due to its requirement.
What the assignment is asking for isn't even terribly difficult when you do understand what is required, and the code is rather simple and minimal to implement. But you end up having to figure out a lot of that either off site (in which case you are not learning from the course) or by modifying a copy paste of some of the templates/scaffolding from the course GitHub content, in which case you don't get a good reinforcement of the material.
In the end I wound up getting a certificate, feeling like I passed despite the course rather than because of it. There is some good foundation for a course in here, but it just falls apart in the third week and lacks any real depth.
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