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 dont even tell you about (expected return values under certain situations) until you actually run the grader. They werent 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 isnt 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 isnt 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 dont 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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