Building an Application with CoffeeScript Review

The intro of the video course states “familiarize yourself with CoffeeScript” and I did (course link http://bit.ly/1ix4XXb)  The other list items of learning in the description are also fairly accurate.  The “cake” built tool was demonstrated, using jQuery with coffeescript was demonstrated, built a simple framework was also demonstrated.  The inaccurate part of the description is the “Who is this video course for” which states “if you’re a beginner Javascript developer… this course is for you” …NOT!  Realistically it should be written as “if you’re a beginner coffeescript developer this course is for you”.  The usage of MVC concepts was great but it’s helpful if you’re already familiar with MVC.

After going through the course, I realized it is a good overview of coffeescript and how useful it could be, even though it’s not what I would call a “walkthrough” course.  It’s more of a class lecture where the professor describes the things you can do with coffeescript with a few examples then you get homework and have to figure it out on your own.

I was really excited at the beginning (section 1) watching the author use http://js2coffee.org to see the instant conversion of javascript.  It’s really fantastic how coffeescript applies good coding methods to develop your code.  This is also the part the author referred to the coffeescript’s documentation which is fine, but an actual demo would have been better.  I found the command line “cake” easy to understand but the author just types “cake -c filename” to show you the compiling but not telling you the “-c” option which I had look for in the documentation myself.

The template files are included so that’s helpful, but the coding speed in the video is too fast so don’t try to code along.  You will just have to open the corresponding chapter files when changing chapters.  The added benefit is some resources introduced in the video like the website where you can find any javascript library and a javascript library for generating PDF files.

To summarize this would have been an excellent course if it were double in length, walking you through the coding process, but instead it seems like a professor doing a typical lecture and expecting you to figure out the homework on your own. Get the course here!