Tim Buchalka's Java Programming Masterclass for Software Developers Course Review

I have some exposure to java programming before so beginning of the course was straight forward. it had some weird jumps here and then plus many examples are kind of out of context and complicated. guess Tim wanted the students to have more hand practice in coding but turned out just tedious. otherwise I think it is a solid start to learn java. add MOOC to it and you should be good to go. looking forward to finishing it, as the course itself is 80h and independent practice additional to it, guess will finish it somewhere in beginning of february.

Like what the others say, it gets a bit unorganized later and massive jumps and leaps. This is okay, buy it on sale if you dont mind tossing a bit of money. It wont be the only thing you will need to learn from.

You can't voice issues and get answers real time explanations tailored to your question. which causes you to become frustrated and even hopeless and potentially give up because you first have to have a rudimentary understanding before you progress further-which is exactly what some of his students were complaining about. I have his course, 2 others, Bruce eckels 'thinking in java' book, 24 hour java' book, as well as visits to multiple learning websites. Some concepts are easy because I already knew php, others seem very elusive. I'd hop around the internet trying to get a grasp of what, why, when, etc. It's definitely been a journey! I've not found one instructor that does a fantastic job teaching this online. I was hoping for Dr Angela Yu to have a course, I love her web development course. She's very thorough. But, to answer your question, I found his teaching to be much better than the other instructor I was following, however, I'm on the chapter where a ton of people complained about the big knowledge jump and his exercises. I haven't finished it, but I did read the many comments, because I had a question and wanted to see if it had been answered already. I've had some exposure to Java, but still very much a beginner. Even though I hadn't finished his 80 hour course, it was so much better than the other one I was taking(the other guy was all over the place, talked way too fast, didn't explain what or why he was doing things, and clicked around fast on his computer so it was hard to follow), that I looked into his other courses, and none were rated as highly as this java' one; I figured maybe they were made before this one. Personally, I only purchase the classes when they're around 10$, so if I miss the return window, it's not like I lost out on a ton of money. If you were to get it, try to get it on sale. At least It starts off good.

It's not bad but I think it needs more involved problems to work through. It's easy to lose focus with these kinds of courses. I recommend making extensive notes & creating related example code on GitHub to illustrate the points & show you've understood it. The good thing is that with Udemy you can always re-do parts of the course if you've forgotten or get a bit rusty at anything covered in the course.

In the beginning, it seems okay, but in the later stages the jumps he makes are too large and the explanations are lacking. Do the MOOC u/Automoderator lists in their comment. It is currently the best Java course around - and it is free.

What I learned definitely helped. I don't think one course is enough to learn anything thoroughly, Tim's course or anyone else's. What I'd recommend is to do the course, and after each section look at other resources covering the same topic and supplement your learning that way. The MOOC course is similar in my opinion and I also completed that; it's more hands on than Tim's course, but I felt it didn't really explain many things in the depth I wanted it to. I felt Tim was better at explaining things in general. My point basically is that one course isn't a silver bullet to learning, and whichever you pick you will want to supplement it by diving deeper into the topic area. What I did was take Tim's course first and googling topics I still wasn't clear about. About finishing that, I did the MOOC course for more practical java skills. When I went to university, I felt comfortable with all the Java courses and ended up getting an A+ easily.