I wanted to review this coursera class because I enrolled in it and wanted others to benefit from my experience. I finished Courses 1 and 2 with mixed feelings and DNF’d course 3 because of a lack of support.
Course 1 has a different instructor than the rest of the series and is a pretty good introduction to HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I took this class before I found FCC and I enjoyed it. I have mixed feelings about using CodePen - it sure makes it simpler to get stuff up and running although it feels quite artificial. The Coursera class has you use any IDE you are comfortable with and I think this makes for a more realistic scenario. I enjoyed David Rossiter’s lecture style and his slides and examples made the concepts easy to grasp.
Course 2 (and the rest of the series) has an instructor that I didn’t like as much - he put so little effort into creating the lectures that at some points in it he answers his office phone and doesn’t bother to edit it out. He doesn’t have a clear communication style and has weird pronounications for many technical terms - both of which make the lectures difficult to understand.
One of the things that makes FCC so wonderful IMO - is the support from the community. Just when you think you can’t figure something out you have a group of others that are trying to figure out (or have already figured out something you are working on. All Coursera classes have a discussion forum for this same purpose but it seems to have varying usefulness; I am taking a Ruby on Rails class where moderators and the instructor himself have reached out when I have had a problem. This is in contrast to the HK Full Stack series - it is more often than not that a student is not helped at all.
Course 3 is about Angular JS and includes the build tools Grunt and Gulp. The Angular code itself is fairly easy to implement and I was able to get some knowledge of it from this course. However - many students including myself had trouble getting the build tools to work correctly and got no support from the instructor or moderators. The problem with this is that later parts of the course rely on gulp running correctly and it is not possible to continue without it. I gave up once and started over (if you don’t finish the class you can start over the next time the class starts - this is usually in a few weeks) and the next time I was still not able to get Gulp to work correctly.
In Summary - I give the first class of this series (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) a ‘5’, the second course (Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools) a ‘3’, and the third course (Front-End Javascript Frameworks) a ‘1’.