O'Reilly Spring Framework Essentials

This time I’m working on reinforcing some of the Spring and Spring Boot knowledge I’ve picked up from other videos, while seeing if I can learn a couple of new tricks while at it. I’m watching Spring Framework Essentials through my Safari Books Online membership. It’s presented by Ken Kousen, who often hosts the Groovy Podcast. He has a series of three Groovy videos in Safari Books Online that I wouldn’t mind going through sometime in the future. The video series runtime is 5 hours, 14 minutes and it has a five star rating from 35 reviewers. Not bad, let’s see what it covers. ...

June 26, 2017 · 7 min · 1450 words · Lewis Cawthorne

Udemy - Spring Boot Intro

I figured since I am a professional Java programmer that I might as well spent some time getting familiar with some Java technologies that I don’t get to use at work. With this in mind, I purchased Udemy’s “Spring Boot Intro” course for $10 when they had a sale. This course moved a lot quicker than the last course I took from Udemy. It covered basic dependency injection in Spring in probably an hour or less, where the last class focused on dependency injection fundamentals for the entire time. I appreciated the faster pace, as there’s a lot of stuff to cover with Spring Boot. It handles autoconfiguring all the main projects that make up Spring… Spring MVC, Spring Rest, Spring Data, Spring Security, etc. ...

June 22, 2017 · 6 min · 1200 words · Lewis Cawthorne

Command Line Power User

Well, I promised I would review Command Line Power User the other day when I did the Mastering Markdown video, so here it is. This is probably a better video series to give me an opinion of his teaching skills, since it isn’t something I know entirely and is actually a little over an hour of video. Each video is longer also, so it probably won’t annoy me so much when the video player scrolls down to where I can’t see the video after switching files. ...

May 19, 2017 · 3 min · 561 words · Lewis Cawthorne

Mastering Markdown

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. ...

May 17, 2017 · 3 min · 520 words · Lewis Cawthorne