SaaS Class is Live | Hacker News Reader

SaaS Class is Live

saas-class.org

55 pointsJarekS17 comments

I guess this is being mean, but that page looks like everything wrong with teaching programming. Buzzword filled nonsense. What's with mentioning every programming language in the world? Why the hell would you mix 10 or so different skills that are mainly unrelated and some incredibly advanced concepts into a single course?

I know it's free and commendable and all that, but seriously, no wonder there's a shortage of decent programmers if that's what university lecturers think is involved in real world SaSS programming.

Even further, have either of these guys actually done something successful in the SaaS space? I mean, it's obvious they're ridiculously smart and have a lot of academic credibility, but outside of the book they're writing (which you conveniently have to have for this course), I don't see anything that would lead me to think this course is more "I've been here, and here's how to do it" than "I'm taking my normal software engineering course and sticking in buzzwords."

> which you conveniently have to have for this course

No you don't.

It looks like it's a Rails course, and any mention of "every programming language in the world" is an insignificant portion of the curriculum. I'm also not seeing lots of "Buzzword filled nonsense", but just some explanations of various Rails architectures. Sure, some of those might be popular, but this looks like a cohesive course to me.

Exactly. Even though I haven't gone beyond chapter 1 in the book - but only in chapter 3 they try to teach you Ruby assuming you know Java. HTML and CSS are just the basic stuff that you'll need anyway - but there is a focus on the tools like Cucumbur, rspec etc. that's needed for agile development. Surely its not view of "every programming language in the world" course ...

I am not a fan of the how dense the information is presented on the first page, but the other languages are being mentioned only as possible pre-requisites - they are not trying to say that they teach those languages.

Has anyone tried to watch videos from here:

https://www.coursera.org/saas/lecture/preview

They took the voice recording from a live classroom lecture and added it to a powerpoint "pager" presentation. Oh my, is the course like that? Bullet points being read by someone? I think those instructional videos with papercuts, animations and things being drawn in real time are (much) more interesting and "sticky" than this. I'm not discussing content, but it's form. I think format is antiquate and wrong for its purpose as an online couse.

I got the email to say SaaS course went live on the same day that Udactiy's CS373 was published.

I tried both, but within 5 mins of each I felt like Udacity was the only one I'd enjoy (and, indeed, the only one I'm bothering with) - not because of the content (although SaaS class felt more like trad lectures, in a negative way) , but because of Udacity being a much more engaging experience.

Harsh, perhaps, but my time is precious to me, so something's gotta give.

I probably stay with Udacity too. They doesn't force you to buy a book (I mean like SaaS) and SaaS covers only first five chapters from book. As I understand it is not full course.

Im taking this online course, it is very interesting if you have some prior knowledge and experience and you are self-taught like me, because can make sure if you are making things right or wrong, plus learn new things.

>Those submit homework 1 and receive a passing grade will receive a coupon good for 100 hours of small instances of EC2 for use on the remaining homework assignments plus a coupon to upgrade their free GitHub accounts to a Micro account (both good through the end of course).

Looks like they've put a lot of effort into this course. Judging by the syllabus, I think a better title would have been: Intro to Ruby and Web Programming

Fascinating, this course is virtually identical to CMU's Foundations of Software Engineering. As another poster mentioned in this thread, it should really be called "Intro to agile web prototype development"

For all registered students - take a look at the Forum there https://www.coursera.org/saas/forum/index - a lot of great stuff there.

The video from the course that I'm currently watching, "2.4 - 3-tiered Shared-Nothing Architecture and Scaling", shows slides with the RHS of the text truncated.

Most of all the new videos are truncated. I've subscribed to the course 'cause I know a bit of coding but i'm missing all the new MVC stuff, hoping to find a great course. Unfortunately I think the quality (for the first published videos) is a bit under par: truncated text in slides, noisy audio, no subtitles and generally (up to now) the level is quite basic. I hope it will be better going on..

You can get slides in PDF/PPT and it looks like subtitles are coming but you're right, the video is a bit annoying.

I know i can download pdf/ppt (actually I can also just watch the truncated slides and guess what's there, you can understand 95-99% of what's written) but I think all these problems make the course a bit less professional than it should be

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