Application Systems Programming

Highly recommended! The material is well designed and presented, making it easy to understand what you have to do at each step. A great course to take for those who want to fill in gaps in their Unity know how before taking the actual exam.

After completing first part of this game I thought: okay it was easy, ergo it also will be easy. And sometimes it was, but for many hours I struggled with some little features because of unknown functions in Unity. Sometimes it was very hard for me and I was about to quit. I did not and know I am better programmer and having more patience with these systems. This course was great, I have learned a lot. If You are interested, it is quite nice for beginners (like me 🙂 ) and mids. Thanks to Coursera too for having chance to get this course without payment as a student!

This course is an embarrassment to Unity and should be taken down, remade, tested, then re released. I give this course one star for the following reasons: I. Unprofessional, convoluted Code from an outdated instructor. II. Everyone copy paste’s the instructor’s code to pass. III. Horribly overpriced for what you get Part I: Unprofessional, convoluted code from Instructor Throughout this course, the instructor often supplies his code. Id like to argue that his code is unprofessional and goes against many good coding practices. Seeing unprofessional code from an instructor paid by Unity, let alone being instructed to use it to complete courses, is unfortunate to students and breeds bad programmers. Some students purchased this specialization because they wanted to learn a “Unity Approved” way of making a game they wanted to learn “industry standards”. This course does not teach you these. Here are some examples I found in the instructors code to be unprofessional, bad practices: 1. Right off the bat, the instructor tells you to use Unity 3D to make a 2D asteroids game. https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/physics/physics best practices Here is a link from a Unity.com article stating that this is a bad practice. 2. The instructor has oddly spaced code and cluttered .cs files. The amount of commented code the instructor leaves in a solution is not professional. Especially when he is telling you to download his code. The instructor’s code is cluttered with DEBUG IF, SUMMARY, , //Comment which makes the actual code very difficult to read. I am under the impression that commented code is a good thing if it descriptive and non invasive. The instructor’s code violates the non invasive portion of that belief. The instructor also has some very odd code spacing where he tabs over two times after declaring a variable type this leads to his code being difficult to read. 3. The instructor violates the law of demeter basically stating that if you are “dotting” into something more than twice, you probably need to rethink your approach. Dotting means “Function.doThing().getThing.. etc. 4. The instructor fails to optimize any part of his code. a. The instructor keeps unused library imports at the top of his .cs files b. The instructor declares many variables inside his Update loops when they could be promoted to member variables. c. The instructor uses non performant functions such as comparing by tag with “.tag ” instead of “.CompareTag(TAG)”. d. The instructor uses Update loops for code that affects physics this should be done in a FixedUpdate(). e. The instructor makes no mention of ObjectPooling in a game that Instantiates objects left and right. f. The instructor fails to demote variables/methods from public when they do not need to be. For reasons stated above, I believe that this instructor is not up to date with current Unity programming standards and shouldn’t be teaching ANY want to be pro Unity programmer. 5. The instructor has overly complex solutions for problems that do not demand it. Sometimes the instructor will use complex maths, create entirely new scripts, go the complete round about way of doing something rather than thinking “is there is a better way to do this?”. 6. The instructor makes methods that “kind of work” but then creates additional “helper classes” to really make it actually work. This is a problem that students often struggle with, not one that teachers should struggle with. If your solution doesn’t work 100%, re think it and do it again. 7. The instructor often switches between bracketing syntaxes. After he declares a method, he will sometimes put a bracket immediately to the right or below it. This makes code hard to read and is considered bad practice. 8. The instructor uses uses no sort of inheritance or interface implementation in his code. The instructor missed ample opportunities to use inheritance or interface implementation. Part II : Copy+paste to succeed In this specialization, the instructor often mentions that “[his] solution is not the only one”. I have programmed long enough to know that there is always a better solution than yours somewhere. As a programmer, it is a good idea to always believe their is no one concrete way of doing something. However, if you go through the courses believing this instructor, you will have a “difficult” time. In a video in week three, course 2, the instructor says “if you’ve been working off of your own project, and working forward, which would be difficult…”. By the instructor saying that working off of your OWN SOLUTION would be difficult if taking this course, I felt he was effectively thinking and implying that students were and should be using the instructor’s code. If true, he negates his comment “my solution is not the only one”. This not only encourages a “copy paste” mentality, but demands it to succeed. As a result, all but one of my 4 peer reviews I downloaded were simply copy pastes of the instructor’s code. Part III. Horribly overpriced for what you get This course is $80. After completing this course I feel ripped off for the quality that I received. There are better Youtube videos, more informative Udemy courses, and better optimized blog posts than this course. This course is the most disappointing online course I have ever purchased. Maybe second to the the first course within this specialization. One star because they tried to make a course.