Review: NodeJS - The Complete Guide on Udemy

January 17, 2020

I spent the past couple of weeks working through NodeJS - The Complete Guide by Maximilian Schwarzmüller on Udemy. I thought the course was really great and offered a nice concise approach that covered the necessary details of things without dragging things out.

I watched the videos and worked along with Max to build the apps as he did. I already had some experience with using express so it was a bit of a refresher but I definitely learned some new things and it was great to validate the approaches I had taken in previous Node toy apps. I tried to make sensible commits to my working repository as I went through the course so I'd have a good reference for how to implement each thing. Check out my repo here: https://github.com/brentkeller/nodejs-complete

The Good

My absolute favorite thing about this course was the demonstration of different data access options. The sample app was a basic store and Max showed how to do data persistence in a variety of ways to give a primer on each thing. We stored things using files on disk, in SQL using sequelize, in MongoDB using the mongodb driver and also with mongoose. I skimmed over the section using mysql2 because I didn't want to set up a MySQL server. Instead I used my existing MS SQL Server instance for the sequelize section. It was really nice to get exposure to all of these options and I feel like I could jump into using any of them as needed.

I enjoyed the chance to build an API with REST and then re-write it using GraphQL. Particularly the REST implementation was not new material for me but it was nice to work through the API using both technologies.

I also really appreciated the section on testing. It was good to work through examples of testing async controllers with and without accessing a database. Testing is something I feel like I can always do better and it seems that I grow more by seeing how other people have done it.

The Bad

I don't have anything bad to say about this course. It starts from zero knowledge of Node which was a bit boring out of the gate, but that's expected for a course titled "The Complete Guide." I could have easily skipped the beginning parts but I have a fear of missing out on a useful tidbit so I stuck it out.

What's Missing?

The course pretty much exclusively covers running a web server using express. This isn't a total surprise given the popularity of express and that the course is already 36+ hours of content. I did find myself wanting some exposure into creating console apps but I can find that somewhere else.

Conclusion

I would 100% recommend this course to anyone who wants to jump into Node.js development. It covers all of the basics and gives enough exposure to some more advanced topics so you'll know where to start in solving those problems. Huge thanks to Max for the great course and all the things I learned!