Elixir For Beginners (Udemy/self-published)

Wow, thanks for this.

Still active, thanks.

I just checked, and before signing up for that course, there was a small label near of the sign up button, telling me that my voucher is still valid until march 31st.

I’m wondering if I can take the course even later or if I need to do the whole thing during the next week…

Once it’s yours it’s yours and you can do it anytime - at least that is what it’s like with my other Udemy courses.

Awesome! Thanks for this!

Quick review. I consider myself an intermediate/advanced beginner in programming in general, with most of my experience in JavaScript (and a smidge of Ruby), so take it for what that’s worth.

I was mostly able to follow the course, and found it really useful as big picture overview of Elixir. It was particularly good in explaining concepts like map/reduce, recursion, and pattern matching. I think it will be a great precursor to diving into the Thomas book, which I plan to read concurrently while working through what looks like a pretty awesome 11-part series by Brandon Richey on Writing a Blog Engine in Elixir and Phoenix.

My one niggly complaint is the use of the Vim split screen while working on two different files. As I was following along, manually typing in code, this was frequently a source of confusion and mistakes.

Overall though, I got a lot out of this course and highly recommend you snap it up!

I’m not going to give this course the deserved review on Udemy because Udemy deserves such courses, and because it’s been free, but here, I will allow myself to be blatantly honest.

This is yet another example of “I’ve done this for X years, therefore I can teach it”, no you can not!
People Teach for 30 years and don’t dare call themselves teachers, but if you’re a programmer, somehow that doesn’t apply to you!
1337 h4x0rs have the magic skills of teaching from birth!

This tutorial is not for beginners in any sense of the word. Which makes the title misleading.

In this course 5 minutes are devoted to explaining “1+1” and equally 5 minutes are devoted to explaining “Reduce & Map a recursive example”.
Right there and then a huge red flag with a big IT’S A SCAM sign should go off.

This course is steaming with all the deadly sins of bad tutorials:
0. Explaining concepts in a new language with examples from another unknown language! Great idea!

1. Explaining using terminology and concepts which a beginner will not know about, and if they did know, they wouldn’t need the explanation.
2. Youge jumps and leaps of faith as to what the viewer understands, without explaining much of anything at all.
3. Captain obvious style of “teaching”, “Oh look this is a variable, oh look this is a function, look at it run now, you got it right? WOO! Exactly how we expected it! You’re so smart!”
4. “I explain it to myself” teaching.
5. I explain code while my cursor is randomly wondering on the screen, confusing people as to what I’m talking about.
6. “As you can see we have added X here”, never explains what X is, or does.
7. “As you can see, this function returns what we expect it to return” never explains what we’re expecting from that function and why we’re expecting such a result.
8. Copy paste code! Copy paste code when you’re explaining something new to beginners is NOT OK! Maybe it’s great for your “I’ll do this 5 mins video real quick and wait for idiots to give me money”, but it’s not great for people who are trying to understand syntax and how it works, and MOST PROBABLY it’s the first time they see Elixir syntax, not to mention Functional Programming, how do you expect them to develop an understanding of your functions AT A GLANCE??? Pause the video? Make people work and do your job? How much are you willing to pay them for it?
9. Explaining new functionality which requires 1 line of code with 20 lines of code “just to show off how hax0r you are”.
10. In this Beginner’s course I expect that Beginners will know all about —insert all the tings I must explain to beginners but will not here—.

I have all these complaints not because I was unable to understand the course, quite the opposite, I understand the material very well and that’s exactly why I understand all the issues I’ve pointed above.

Please, if you’re an experienced developer, that’s wonderful, good for you, but that DOES NOT, DOES NOT, make you a teacher.
In fact, such people are probably the worst people to teach beginner courses, due to their extensive experience and tendency to SKIP the “simple” stuff.

The poor soul that’s going to see “Elixir for Beginners” and buys this course.

Oh wait! 5 minutes video explaining processes and message passing --insert Hateful Eight SLJ laugh here–

Sorry if I’m being too rude, maybe it’s because I’ve seen this for the 1000000 time and consider such “courses” an absolute scam, which they are.
"Oh, I’m going to read the official documentation to you in this video thingie, but first give me the moneyz okiez?^=^ <3 "

As a beginner - most definitely to Elixir/functional programming, and more generally with programming - I did find this course useful. That said, I do agree that it’s not appropriate for someone who has zero coding experience.

I don’t know what you mean by this: “explaining using terminology and concepts which a beginner will not know about, and if they did know, they wouldn’t need the explanation.” In my case, I had some vague recognition of the words reduce and map, for example, but had very little idea what they did or why they were useful. I found the explanation here very illuminating.

" I explain code while my cursor is randomly wondering on the screen, confusing people as to what I’m talking about" - I tend to agree with this, particularly with the Vim split screen showing 2 different files, as I mentioned in my original post.

“Copy paste code!..” - I didn’t copy/paste, but I was manually typing in the code. I found this helped me a) get familiar with typing it, and b) the act of doing so slowed down my mental processes and helped with understanding the syntax and what given piece of code was doing.

In regards to “5 minutes video explaining processes and message passing --insert Hateful Eight SLJ laugh here–” in particular, I totally disagree. I found that explanation interesting and illuminating. I worked through the PingPong example and feel that I got a lot out of it.

Perhaps being more advanced makes you less aware of what’s useful to a beginner, just as being a beginner makes me less able to determine what’s ‘good’. While I don’t disagree with some of your points, with others I had the exact opposite experience that you foretold beginners would have.

I really don’t have the time to point out all the bad things in this tutorial because it’s almost every other sentence.
“This is part of the Actor Model. Erlang and Elixir use the Actor Model as a metaphor for inter process communication.” - never explains what the Actor Model is.

If you don’t explain what the Actor Model is, I find little use of showing me how to start a process and why would I want to pass messages around?! It’s as simple as that.

If you don’t explain the paradigm, showing me “stuff” being done and “things” moving around means nothing.

I’m glad that you find this tutorial useful, but I had to travel to Erlang and Haskell in order to understand most of the things that the author of this course just “Mentions Away” and considers explained.

I have no idea where someone coming from OO language would know them, but I sure must have read the wrong books if people do.

I haven’t seen the videos myself yet but I think he should be commended for putting together learning material. Perhaps you could send him some suggestions on how he can improve the course?

Maybe a different title may be better suited to it, something like “An introduction to Elixir for those who know other programming languages” perhaps?

I think it was pointed out in another thread that when doing videos you’ll always get some that really like what you do and some that don’t, but either way I’m sure that he would be interested in receiving feedback about the course.

Just a final note about this since you mention it, please don’t forget that the person who made this course is part of our community too - so while open and honest reviews are always good, please also be tactful and considerate