Course Review: GCP Cloud Architect (Udemy)

I've been exploring the online video courses "learning path" since a year and a half, making this one the third course I finish. Two are from Udemy (paid but cheap) and one from Coursera (free). As at work we're migrating some services from AWS to GCP I thought would be a nice idea to repeat Udemy, based on how good the other AWS course was.

Google Cloud Platform - Cloud Architect "In depth coverage of all Services, 200+ Practice questions & 4 Case Studies Design" Sounded quite nice, covering services like Compute, Storage & Database, Networking, VPN & VPC, IAM, Security, Management Tools, and intros to ML and BigData. And while yes, it covers all those topics, it is more like an introduction to them.

Sadly, I'll dedicate the remainder of the post to why you shouldn't bother buying that course even if has some huge discount, so let's get to it:

There is absolutely no cadency when speaking, it is a mere reading of either the slides or slide notes (those not so frequent times that there's more content than what you see). Add to that both typos and mistakes at the slides with errors when reading them, and you get a fatal combo. It was so terrible that I've studied more than half of the course without sound, pausing and advancing myself "the slides". Because another issue is that many times the author is either not even checking his "reading position" regarding the visual content, or doesn't cares, so after reading like a robot a big bullet list, if you're not fast stopping the video, you almost won't read the final line.

Other issues are terrible speaking errors and pauses, which should have meant a re-recording of the segment, but instead were left. Or mistakes like going out of MS Powerpoint presentation mode and not caring to turn it on again until after a while, like here:

Another of my top annoyances is the mouse pointer. on each and every video you see the little annoying pointer being used sometimes to remark things but many things to just leave it anywhere, usually covering letters, diagrams and most times distracting the watcher.

Everything looks like coming from a teacher/evangelist kit or directly from Google web documentation, which I'm not against but combined with all the previous defects makes the course as a whole lacking any quality. If we were given all the slides would be more productive and useful. And the few demos I tried to watch and follow, were so terribly prepared (full of long pauses, mistakes, etc.) that I skipped all of them.

Now don't get me wrong about one aspect: the author's english is not too bad and could be understood way better if he had made the effort of not reading the notes and focused on real explanations of the contents shown.

I'm a stubborn guy so I went through all the non-demo videos, because you always learn something and I was past refund date anyway.

It might be a nice introduction and less hardcore than digesting all of Google's GCP online documentation at once, but I really doubt it.

Note: I also left a 0.5 / 5 rating of the course inside the learning platform, alongside a detailed explanation of why so low.