The course was sometimes frustrating. I didn't take notes of all the annoyances, but some of those that I remember are:
- Lab solution videos had very poor resolution, in half of them the instructor has the Lab window open in only small portion of his screen which made it impossible to see what he was doing.
- The materials were poorly prepared and sometimes confusing. Slides were full of typos and there was even wrong code once or twice. The instructions were not very clear for some Lab exercises. It felt like the course was prepared in a hurry and nobody had reviewed it before publishing.
- Eclipse IDE had to be set up from scratch on each launch even though the instructions claim otherwise. Even worse, Eclipse often refused to run my code because it could not resolve imports. When I cut all the code and pasted it back (without changing anything), it magically worked.
- One question in the final quiz was wrongly evaluated, so my correct answer was labelled incorrect.
- One quiz included a question that had not been covered by the course until the following week.
- Overall I felt like the explanation wasn't always very clear. In each video I had to pause multiple times and google the subject myself to understand what the instructor actually wanted to say. So in the end, I managed to learn what I hoped to learn, but that was mostly thanks to external (and free) websites.
To end on a positive note, I stil found the course useful. It gives a good guidance on what to learn when you want to familiarise yourself with Spring. The deadlines motivated me to actually take the learning seriously without procrastinating. By the end of the course I figured out that it's better to do the reading parts first, then the activities, and then the videos and lab exercises. I think the videos make more sense when you do the reading first, at least if you are completely new to Spring.