I know some of you JavaRanchers were also doing this course, so I thought maybe we could share our views of the course and perhaps encourage other Ranchers to try it out next time. If anybody's curious, go to
https://education.10gen.com/ to find out more.
I had no experience at all of MongoDB when I started the course, a little bit of Python and 20+ years of relational databases. As a grumpy old Oracle developer, I was a bit sceptical about the whole "NoSQL" bandwagon, but curious to find out more. The document database MongoDB turned out to be the ideal intro to NoSQL for me - a good balance between structured schema-like data that can be queried efficiently, and the flexibility and scalability that are supposed to be the hall-mark of NoSQL approaches. I'm already trying to think of projects that will allow me to try this newly acquired knowledge out on a real-world problem.
The course materials were well thought-out, well structured and paced about right for most participants as far as I could tell. This is a commercial-style training course, rather than an academic course, so it certainly wasn't as challenging as my recent Coursera experience with Scala, but that might also reflect my relatively strong background in DBs. In any case, there was still plenty to get your teeth into and also plenty of variation as we covered a wide range of topics, and I found the stuff on sharding and replication especially interesting as these are the things that are often hard to do well in RDBMS land. The exercises, quizzes and final
test were well designed and provided a decent test of our understanding. A lot of people complained about having to use Python (the next presentations in 2013 include a
Java option), but you didn't really need to know much Python and the bulk of the coding could be achieved using the MongoDB JavaScript shell anyway.
The course platform was a bit flaky at times (the "Progress" page is still pretty clunky), and there were a few minor glitches in putting materials online promptly, which is excusable as this was the first presentation of the course, but overall things ran pretty smoothly and the tests etc worked fine. I found the forums less useful, as the format wasn't ideal, but I didn't really need them much anyway. The course presenters were engaging and explained the material very clearly, which contributed to the strong sense of smooth progress through the course. 10Gen also deserve to be saluted for their success in keeping the course running and getting back up to speed so quickly after the storm in NYC.
So if you want to find out more about MongoDB and the wonderful world of NoSQL, I can strongly recommend this course from 10Gen: it's well implemented, good fun, and you'll learn a lot of interesting new stuff.
