Ruby on Rails Web Services and Integration with MongoDB

Great course, but the lectures could be more helpful, i.e. more detailed!

I found this course hard to follow. There are better ways out there to learn MongoDB and Mongoid. The lectures feature a lot of copy and pasted magic code and don't give a sense of how you would compose the queries in practice. The problems often require you to guess what the lecturer had in mind, even when they are phrased in an open-ended way - if you don't do it the expected way, something is going to break later on.From a technical point of view, the course has not aged well. The Ruby/MongoDB/Mongoid stack leads to dependency hell (not entirely the fault of the lecturer or JHU). It is likely your code will work fine and pass the tests on your machine, but fail the automated grader. There are many complaints in the forums along those lines, and the mentors were quite helpful in responding to them, but they no longer seem to be active and it appears the course is no longer being actively supported by JHU.I abandoned this course after losing my fight with the automated grader in week 3 and running into more technical problems in week 4. The course is not completely useless and you will learn something about MongoDB from it, but I'm struggling to find other positives so I gave it two stars. I would not recommend the course but if you are taking the RoR full
stack specialization, don't let that stop you from moving on to the
other courses which have generally been very good.

Very useful and informative

not easy at all its professional level course, thumbs UP

Not up to (my) expectations.This course is not bad, I've seen much worse on coursera, BUT is it good enough to justify the investment, I'm not sure. Following the video is tedious, and boring. The instructor gives the impression he follows a recipe, and never explains why he's doing what he's doing: he rather describes what we already have on screen. I can read, thank you! I expect much more from an online course, supported by a reputable university. I expect some deeper explanation, I want to be taught why things are the way they are. Why do we choose MongoDB over a conventional RDBMS ? What are the benefits ? the drawbacks ? This should be explained to put things in context. Toward the end of first week, the instructor switches to "MongoLab". He never introduces it or explain what it is! One sentence would be enough to put things in context. I'm not on coursera to follow a soulless recipe, Technical matters are often dry, repetitive, boring, I need to feel some excitment from the instructor, and I need him to put things in context, to unveil what is not obvious.

This course requires more time commitment than the other ones in this specialisation. The explanation regarding MongoDB is pretty thorough, but the integration with rails takes some time to get a good hold of. I would recommend this course for just MongoDB.

I think this course is more difficult than it's presented.

The Modules are too long, the application takes instead of 6 hours up to 20-30The instructions are not en ought clear, most of things must be googled or even looked how it's done by another students ex. Module 2, Photos, 5 contentType vs. content_typeSome tests are passed even if program written wrong ex. find_nearest_place_id max_meters, i have returned place[:id] instead of place[:_id] and test passed. and this error made a lot of problems in further testsFor Module 3 it's written that app will take 12 hours I even afraid to start it. It could take up to 1 month of work, if do it 2 hours each day. Take it to attention, please. Usually this activity is should not take such long type. Make a splitting with GridFS, and Indexes to 2 weeks

I learned a lot of MongoDB and how to integrate it with Rails.

I didn't find it helpful that all the code was simply given to us and we kind of had to figure out what it did. I prefer that we're walked through the creation process, that way I understand not only how the code works, but how to build it myself.

Overall this is a great course with a lot discussion on MongoDB and using Ruby on Rails to build web services. However, it would be better if the professor can give more explanation on codes and syntaxes rather than just copying and pasting lines of codes to command line and show what the results are - we can do that ourselves, but we want to know why that works. And also, the projects are much harder than what I expected - project 2 would definitely take more than 8 hours and so does project 3. And some of the implementations in the projects are given a great deal of hints but I actually did not find the corresponding materials within the lecture, and I sometimes don't know why I have to do it that way even though I managed to get the codes work. But as a whole this course is great - it offers a different look at database and this is the only course that talks about web services rather than web apps in this specialization. I gave my opinions not because I am complaining, but because I wish I could contribute to its becoming better.

Great exposure to Mongo and a different way of implementing a database