Kiril Anastasov

The instructor chose a good variety of topics to cover. Most of the instructions were clear and I could easily repeat them in my Eclipse installation. There were some problems with continuity; for example, a lesson from a section would end with the terminal being in one directory and the next would start with the terminal in a different directory but the instructor would not comment on the change. I found section 8 M2E Eclipse Plugin to be far poorer than the rest of the course. It appears that it was added after the rest of the course was finalized. A number of lessons were unfinished, specifically, section 52 where the MixedCase java file is left unfinished. The instructor's choice of plugin-site-1 for generating the archetype does not work. Others produced varying errors including one that installs the subdirectories of the project directly into the Eclipse workspace. I struggled with getting MwDependicies to compile. I finally found that I needed to modify the InstalledJRE to get it to work. Perhaps that is showing my ignorance of some of the fundamentals of Eclipse. To sum up, you will learn the mechanics of Maven from this course. It does, however, remind me of my initial calculus classes where I learned techniques of differentiation and integration--the how-to--but not the underlying theory or thinking behind what was going on.
- Review by Kirk Freyermuth on Apache Maven - The complete course