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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 ...

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