Course reflection - "AngularJS: Get Started" by Scott Allen

AngularJS: Get Started is a beginner level three hour video course by Scott Allen that currently tops the list of popular courses on Pluralsight, a subscription-based video tutorial site. I enjoyed the course as there were practical samples I could try along while watching the videos. I highly recommend it to anyone getting started with AngularJS.

Experts on a topic are generally under the curse of knowledge. They know so much about a subject that they cannot explain it to their grandmother in simple terms. Scott Allen is a great teacher though. He simplified the topics and applied it to real-world scenarios. He provided adequate background (Revealing Module pattern, Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE), pronounced iffy) before setting out to explain progressively more complex AngularJS topics. The course material was well-organized.

Thanks to him, I got to try out Plunkr, the online code editor (it's open source & IMO more feature rich than JSBin & JSFiddle which I've been using so far) and the Github API (great for anyone who wants to play with a JSON feed without having to bother about keys for fetching simple info).

I also found how challenging it is for course creators to keep their material up to date. Books on technical topics become stale by the time the reach they reach the stores and now learning videos are starting to face the same plight due to the scorching pace at which some technology topics evolve. The author cleverly stuck a note in a video possibly, post-production to indicate a breaking change in the AngularJS library.

Since the course was published in June 2014, the Github API has also evolved. In a code sample the author refers to the gravatar_id  field which had a alpha-numeric value when the course was produced. That field shows a blank value now.

Also see: Free Pluralsight videos