By Afref Fetter 5 months ago Completed

Prior experience in the field: None

Like:
Get to learn how to make a fully-functional website, using Google App Engine.

Steve Huffman does a great job teaching us about the dos and don'ts of making a website.

Covers a lot of topics in sufficient details - from hashing passwords and secure logins to cookies.

Got to implement all that we'd learned and end up with two blogs!

Dislike:
The lectures on using different APIs was pretty rushed.

Limited to Google App Engine.

Suggested improvements:
Well, not really an improvement, but a follow-up course would be great.

Overall:
An excellent course to learn the finer details of web applications, you'll leave with a fresh feeling of accomplishment!

By Sai from Tokyo 5 months ago Completed

By taking this course, you will be able to build a simple web site that serves dynamically created pages. And it is FREE unless you need to scale to tens of GB of data and hundreds of thousands of users. The course uses Google App Engine (in Python) as the base platform, on which Udacity itself is built. It starts with HTTP request/response, covers memcache, etc., and eventually lets students build something like http://udacity-cs253.appspot.com/blog. I had some experience with App Engine before but still found this course informative in 2 ways:
- It shows the best practice to store user password. Steve confessed that he learned it the hard way and apparently, he is not the only one: http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/06/08/1633224/linkedin-password-leak-salt-their-hide
- In the last lecture, he shared his experience about how his team started http://www.reddit.com/ and grew the site to a much larger scale.

Even after finishing this course, you need to learn more about template engines, CSS, and JavaScript but at least it puts you at the starting point.

Note specific to those who took this course: no need to explicitly manage memcache for datastore any more if you use ndb (https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/ndb/overview).

By SB 7 months ago Completed (Partially)

I'm almost done with this course and I'm quite happy with it. I just started web development so I'm not certain if its missing anything but it seems to cover most of the building blocks of a web application:
* HTML / CSS
* Templating engine (jinja2)
* HTTP requests
* Basic web framework (webapp2)
* Deploying using Google App Engine

I like that it has a good mixture of theory and practical advice. Steve Huffman pulls out a lot of anecdotes from Reddit to help illustrate common problems with scaling and building a web app.

Overall I'm pretty happy - I have been able to ramp up on web apps without any web background. However, the technologies used (GAE / wepapp2) are probably not want what you want to use to deploy your own web app. It'd be nice if he taught more commonly used frameworks (Flask, Django) and deployment options (AWS, Heroku) but that probably would not work for an intro course.

Note that those coming from CS101 on Udacity with no prior programming background will have some issues. Specifically, you write your code in your environment, there is less hand holding (you have to pick up a few libraries on your own and have to Google), and also he uses classes which aren't explained in 101. I'd advise working on a mini-project or two in Python before you jump into CS253.

By Jeanne Boyarsky from New York 8 months ago Completed

I took this course because I wanted to see what the creator of reddit would say about building software. And it gave me an opportunity to do something non-trivial in Python.

I really liked theinline Python editor. It made the interactive quizzes fun. The homework got me to practice Python a lot to which was nice. And there was exposure to a Python MVC framework for those interested although it wasn’t required. It was also interesting to see what college students are taught about the web “these days.” More emphasis on performance/scalability/ideas then 10 years ago when I graduated.

The time commitment wasn’t large. The lectures were short snippets and easy to fit in. The assignments were easy – probably because I already am a web developer – albeit not in Python.

The forums were good (stack exchange style). Udacity structures things so the quizzes/assignments don’t count and are “self paced.” They offer final exams every hexa-semester which is what counts toward the “certification.” I find it more fun to stay with the initial offering because you get the benefit of discussion with other students exploring together.

Extracted from my blog review comparing to coursera http://www.selikoff.net/2012/07/08/udacity-and-coursera-python-editor-peer-reviewing-and-complaining/

By Chris Beard from Atlanta, Georgia 23 days ago Completed (Partially)

No prior web-dev experience, but this covered all the basics I needed to get started. Prof explained topics well.

By Dan from Vancouver, British Columbia 36 days ago Completed

Where instructor Steve Huffman lacked in teaching experience, he made up for in enthusiasm, a natural and articulate delivery, and a frame of reference closer to beginners (temporally speaking) compared to potentially out-of-touch older professionals or tenured professors. Like any new instructor, you quickly adapt to his style of communication. The TAs in this course were extremely helpful, as were the forums.

Prior to this course, I took CS101 with Udacity. I also had some programming background from engineering school more than six years ago.

The 'story line' progression of the course associated with the development of an actual web application worked well to maintain momentum, and Steve's well-timed anecdotes on his personal trials and errors with Reddit and Hipmunk helped me bridge the conceptual gap of how what I was learning (and building) fits with the best and biggest new applications being developed today. Following the course, I applied my new back-end / database skills and created a simple photo album application for a personal website, complete with administration login and content editing forms. (postnostills.appspot.com).

Also, I tended to get stuck on very basic aspects of running programs that are really only learned by trial and error. For example, things like command-line syntax to roll back an application took me hours to figure out -- simply missing quotation marks or incorrect ordering of commands. These beginner errors are the type of momentum killers that experienced users simply don't remember making.

The one criticism I have was how quickly the material in the later units was covered. The beauty of the MOOC format is there aren't the same time-restrictions as in other institutions (save those of the instructors taking sabbaticals to contribute to this world-changing education movement) so go ahead and keep adding material.

By Dave Adler from Manchester, England 50 days ago Taking Course Now

Always wanted to learn about web dev but im not from a computer science background but couldn't get a clear explanation until now.

Just finished unit 2 but in love! Whenever i get a moment i am on there learning.

Excellent teachers, excellent concept, the world is a better place because of courses like this!

By Raz 5 months ago Completed

Steve is not a teacher, he's a programmer. It took a bit to switch in my head coming from other courses. Once I did I loved this course the most. I did have to do more digging and investigating on my own and I think that is what helped me retain more information then anywhere else. What I mostly loved about this course is that it was based on real world examples. Once you're done you can go out and build your own app using everything you've learned. I also enjoyed learning about reddit and how it came to be.

By Robert Komartin from Bucharest, Bucuresti 5 months ago Completed

For his first teaching attempt (as he kept repeating throughout the course), Steve H. gave us a mind-blowing real-life web development experience! Outstanding and warmly recommended!

By Tejas Bubane from Pune 6 months ago Completed

This course has proved to be a milestone in my life. Read more about my expeience with this course on my blogs:

http://foss-geek.blogspot.com/2012/06/becoming-web-application-developer.html

And

http://foss-geek.blogspot.com/2012/07/i-got-job-thanks-to-udacity.html

Thanks again Udacity! :)

By Gavin Conran from Portadown 7 months ago Completed

Steve is a very engaging instructor and covered some complex techniques fully but succinctly. Having taken the SaaS class this Web App class allowed me to compare the pros and cons of using a framework like Rails with a no framework approach.

By Gerard O'Neill from Weehawken, New Jersey 8 months ago Completed

CS253 Web Applications Engineering was pretty damn fun. I’ll admit that it was probably the easiest of the three courses that I’ve completed on Udacity, mainly because web development is my specialty. Still, I learned quite a bit.

Like all Udacity courses, CS253 was taught using Python. To me, this was both good and bad. It was good because I love Python and because it exposed me to Google App Engine and programming websites in Python, which I had never done before. However, most people in the real world use frameworks on top of Python, such as Django or Flask, rather than Google App Engine’s webapp framework. That being said, I’m glad that the course was not taught in Django. I hate Django. Additionally, I’m sure that for students with no prior experience, learning MVC concepts and a specific framework in addition to everything else that had to be learned might be too much. For beginner programmers, I’d say that Steve Huffman made very good choices on what technologies would be used and focused on.

Overall, I think the class was great. It was enough work for students to handle in seven weeks, and it was an amazing introduction to web development. For a seven-week online course, you can only really expect to get people’s feet wet and make them hungry to learn more, and I have no doubts that Huffman did a great job of doing both of those things.

If anyone out there is debating on whether or not this course is worth taking, I can assure you that it is. If you’re a programmer looking to get into web development, a beginner programmer, or even a web developer who wants to try out new technologies, CS253 is an awesome class.

It really goes to show you how much better a practical class is when it’s taught by a professional in the field, rather than someone with a PhD but not much real world experience.