Well, for something a little different, I decided to write my opinion of a free video course. Since I’m writing my blog in markdown, I figured why not review it with something other than the Kramdown cheatsheet. Wes Bos has a number of video courses, some free and some paid for. His Mastering Markdown course is one of the free ones. It’s really only a single 23 minute video, so not much of a course, but since he just came out with a Learn Node course and has another longer free course of Javascript projects, I figured why not try the little course to get a feel for his teaching style and see if I want to invest any more time and/or money in more of his courses later. His other free courses if your interested include Command Line Power User which has some Z shell tips that I might check out, since I’m sure I’m not making the most of it, and JavaScript 30 which is 30 days of building 30 things in vanilla JS (which promises no frameworks, no compilers, no libraries, and no boilerplate). Unless this one is terribly, I’ll probably sit through the command line one after this. The JavaScript 30 one I’ll only invest time in if I like these two. Well, without further ado, here’s my opinion of Mastering Markdown.
Good to see that he isn’t opinionated about editors. He says use whatever editor your most comfortable with, even vim. He uses Sublime Text though and recommends a package for it, if you use it. I went ahead and installed it in my copy of Sublime Text. It’s called MarkdownEditing and has a lot more features than the built in Sublime Markdown package. I spent almost as much time reading the Package Control Messages as the runtime of these videos, but oh well, sometimes I open stuff up in Sublime, so I might as well get it working alright. I took this chance to toggle some settings in vim-markdown while I was thinking about it.
It’s a little annoying that his video player jumps down to the video list when it advances videos. Each one, I have to scroll back up after it advances to see the video again. Probably wouldn’t be so bad on my big monitor instead of the laptop screen. It’s made even more annoying by how short the videos are. Video quality is good, and it is nice that it saves the fact that I’ve set the speed up to 1.25 when it switches videos. I learned something about footnote links that I had forgotten, and a cool feature that lets you highlight a code block as a diff, so it wasn’t time wasted. He talks a little fast anyway, so I probably wouldn’t need the speed increase for something that I didn’t already know.
Overall, I thought the video was OK. I’ll try the Command Line Power User course too and see what I think of it. Currently I just use zshell with oh-my-zsh and a couple of plugins enabled, so maybe I can learn some more zshell tricks.