Amazon Alexa Development: From Beginner to Intermediate (Udemy.com)

You will gain some knowledge with Alexa. Because there aren't that many Alexa tutorials; this tutorial actually isn't a terrible choice. But be prepared as this tutorial does suffer from quite a few drawbacks. The sound quality is very poor (some sections are nearly impossible to hear, even with max volume). There are literally parts from some chapters missing. The instructor does not always explain what he's doing or how the code actually works. I don't know that I would recommend this tutorial for anyone without some experience in development. With all that said, because of the very limited selection of Alexa tutorial out there, this tutorial does provide some value.

This course is fantastic! It got me up and running on Alexa in very little time. There are a couple places I had to debug a little to get it running, but I look at it as good exercise. Also, the Lambda screens have changed since the videos were created, so they're a little out of date. All in all, well worth it and thank you for putting it together.

Videos are too fractured (some one clip even as short as 43 seconds!), including intro and outro - wich is INCREDIBLY loud in comparison to voice, have to adjust volume on every intro and outro - on every episode (which adds about 8-10 seconds in each video). some information is rather ambiguous(calling the "build_speechlet_response" for debugging purposes only in one of the early videos, even though it is used as building block in every function to send message to audio and video) and the more sophisticated programs lack a proper explanation (i.E the wiki buff, what amazon does with multiple files and so on) . some pros: - thorough walkthrough through module creation and function creation - example code to work with and try to understand yourself - a general idea of possibilities with alexa with some use cases all in the name "beginner's guide for alexa" would have been way more appropriate as there is no discussion of advanced topics (aside from grabbing information directly from the web, which is not that new if a requirement is knowledge in jscript). No mentions of persistent data between sessions (Databases), rudimentary home automation or accessing external databases. All in all a mediocre course where - if you have watched the free amazon course here on udemy - you don't learn that much new, aside from web-interactions and a likeable guy who is interrupted way to often by some loud beats. keeping the course but would not buy again

Course is nice and informative though some of the examples did not seem to work to for me. As per my comments the trainer has tried to look into them and find a fix. However they still needs more work and I will work on finding a fix to them. Great thanks to Nick for a pretty good course..

Good course concept and decent delivery. Instructor video sometimes blocks work area and screen shots. Every example has the parts setup explained in great detail, which by example 6 or 7 is a waste of time. Very good explanation of how the code works, and nicely laid out additions to show the changes to modify. Really enforces the various standard coding for Alexa Skill Set. Good development of additional principals and extending the topics into new material. Needs better camera angle, either just voice over or smaller instructor video window.

I learned a lot of things, still need to practice and see how much code i'll understand easily and how much i'll need help. As mentioned by other reviewers it would be great if the codes were explained in more details but that's what we should be able to do if we call ourselves programmers. Also I did not had much trouble with the music at the start and end of every tutorial as what some of the reviewers have complained about. Great course at the discounted price I got. I recommend it.

Great course. Easy to follow and understand. The projects work great and if there are any issues or errors, you'll get an answer in a day or two. Only suggestion would be if you could zoom in when typing the codes. It can be hard to see until you move to another view. All in all, I really enjoyed this course and will be trying out more.

Pros: The course is moving at a manageable pace, explains terminology, and provides practice examples. Cons: the presentation hasn't been polished or edited; sometimes terminology isn't consistent, there are pauses and stumbles, etc. It's a fair value for the $15, at least for me. If it cost much more, I would have been disappointed at the roughness of the production.

I enjoyed the course. It was in simple bursts. You are basically learning by example, which is my preference as I've programmed in numerous languages already. The language is not taught to you. My guess is you would need some type of programming background if you want to move forward with new projects. I believe I've got enough background from this course to do that.

The course as a whole was really fun. I did all the projects and watched all the videos and had a blast doing it. However, my main concern with this course is he didn't really cover the basics as well as I would like. I am not new to node, nor am I an expert, but at the same time I would have liked to have had a longer "Hello World" lecture that went over each and every line so I could get a feel for why Alexa needs these functions, structures, etc. to be the way they are simply because that's how I like to learn. For instance, I still don't really know what Alexa's request is to my lambda functions or how they work together, it's something I can figure out or look up, but still I'd like it to be in this course with the other content I'm taking. I think by adding just one more video that's maybe 10minutes long going through the Hello World's lambda function code line by line could tremendously help viewers and students understand the code better and be more confident in going into this area. Because of the lack of foundation, which maybe I am just too new to node and others won't experience this, I got lost in some of the videos as to why certain things were structured certain ways, like callbacks are always weird for me, how index.js and other files (like the twitter trends app) work together. Or things like function parameters (which you probably can piece together pretty quick, but still I'd liked to have it explained clearly). To me it looks like Alexa lambda functions need to have a very strict and certain layout, and having that explained would've helped me. The Twitter Trends app broke for me, granted I didn't spend much time debugging it, but the instructor forgot to mention where to get the APP_ID for the code, or at least I couldn't find where he mentioned it, that APP_ID is on the Alexa skill set. Also, the mic during that segment was reeeeallly quite so I had to turn the volume way up, but your intro/exit song is suuuuuper loud, superficial complaint but still... those intros/exits were incredibly loud. Overall this course will get you familiar with the process of getting an AWS account up, creating a lambda function, getting an amazon developer account and hooking Alexa skills into lambda, but what it doesn't really cover is how the functions work in lambda which is arguably the hardest part because those functions have to match the format of the interaction model and request model that Alexa makes to your function. After taking the course, I feel extremely well prepared to go watch another tutorial about how these functions work in-depth, but I don't feel prepared to jump right in and make my own. Good course though, and I'd recommend it for the earliest of beginners! :)