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 "

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

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.

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 understand your frustration but I’m sure you’d agree that it’s not fair to take it all out on one person.

I think your review was a bit harsh if I’m honest.

Terms like “IT’S A SCAM” and discouraging remarks like “Please, if you’re an experienced developer, that’s wonderful, good for you, but that DOES NOT, DOES NOT, make you a teacher” are just unnecessary and unhelpful. It’s like you’ve written this person and the course off completely and turned off a whole generation of screencasters with one blow.

I think it’s better to encourage people to make more learning material - it is crucial to passing on knowledge. Some are more experienced than others but everyone has to start somewhere. Who knows, the author of this course may one day be the Ryan Bates of the Elixir world.

We could certainly do with one (or two!)

I think deep down, and perhaps in hindsight, you probably agree with me anyway