As part of my quest to become a cloud developer extraordinaire, I've been trying a number of different learning resources for Google App Engine. I had a pretty positive experience with the Udacity offering. The CBTNuggets series on GAE, however, I found a bit disappointing. Whereas Udacity aims to cover GAE in about a week, the CBT course is about 8 hours. Though really it's more like 5 hours because the demos are all done twice, once in Python and once in Java.
Because they are trying to cover so much material in such a short time frame, there is a LOT of handwaving. "Here, let me paste in some code and we'll go over it"... insert 200 lines of code. I really prefer the coding along style of the Udacity course. I never really felt like I could start from scratch and code up the "CheevedIT" app, because from one nugget to the next the baseline would change, it wasn't a truly incremental build process.
The other complaint I have regarding the code is the way they are using JSPs. Keeping in mind that I'm still very new to Java, I still had to take issue with the amount of inline code I was seeing in these. Even if it's just for a quick demo, it really bothered me to see that.
There was a lot of good stuff, however:
Using modules was something I hadn't seen before, though I wasn't able to get the EAR version of the site to work on my local dev server (some kind of weird no class def exception I didn't feel like tracking down). They also covered how to set the different modules to use different instance types.
Showed how to configure Appstats and Memcache. Appstats in particular is useful because you can use it to track down the expensive parts of your app so you know how to focus efforts to optimize with Memcache.
I really got a lot out of seeing some of the configuration stuff (especially the security constraints). Probably real basic Java stuff and old hat to anyone who'd done this for a while, but I found if valuable.
The discussion of Datastore gave me a little bit better understanding of some of the quirks, particularly regarding working with entity groups and some of the limitation there.
Demonstrates how to set up a pull queue, which wasn't covered by Udacity.
I think if you sit down, turn the speed to 1.3, and muscle through you can probably get about 80% of the value. Trying to follow along with the code is more frustration than it's worth, however. On the plus side, watching at least 50% gets you access to five free exam vouchers. Here is the site for the new GCP cert site (I found the old one which is retired when I tried to search for it...):
https://cloud.google.com/developers/training/exams/
**UPDATE 6/22/2015**
Finished up the last of the qualification tests today, so I'm now a "Google Cloud Platform Qualified Developer"... whoohoo. So a couple thoughts one the overall series. I had the hardest time with the Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL exams, probably due to the light coverage given them in their respective CBTNuggets series (which are, not surprisingly, the shortest). Storage had a lot of questions about access control lists and such that I struggled with, and SQL got into some of the lower level stuff that kind of assumes more intimate knowledge of MySql than the tutorial vids led me to believe. The comments sections of these two pretty much echo my feelings, so it isn't just me. BigQuery and Compute engine were well covered and I felt well prepared for. AppEngine I knocked out of the park (as should be expected). Overall not a bad series and if you get the vouchers, you might as well use them.
Oh, and once last protip: Don't drink a liter of soda right before starting the test. You aren't allowed to take breaks during the exam. Garth talks about taking breaks between exams and it threw me off... lets just say I had a rough few minutes at the end of the Storage test (which I used almost the entire 90 minutes).
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