Week of August 25 to 31, 2013

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Coursera:

1) All summer courses ended. Completed two courses and dropped three.
2) Signed up for Principles of Reactive Programming, Programming Handheld Systems with Android and Microeconomics Principles.

MongoDB University:

3) 10gen Education renamed to MongoDB University.
4) Completed M102 Final Exam. It is consisted of eleven questions and took me two days to complete. Exam result will be released on next Tuesday.
5) Completed M101J Homework 5 (Aggregation Framework). It is same as Homework 5 of M101P.
6) Completed M101JS Homework 3 (Implement add new post and new comment functionality). The asynchronous callback concept is unnatural to me to grasp right now. Give me several weeks and I should be comfortable of passing callback function to nodeJS function.

Udacity

7) Begin Lesson 2 of CS253 Web Development. This week covers HTML controls, Http Request and Response that I have already learnt since 2006. However, Steve still teaches many new things that I did not know beforehand. My objective this weekend is to use Python and Webapp2 framework to write html pages and have them run in local google app engine.

Fevawork:

8) Retake lesson 4 of Certificate in Google Android Application Development for Marketing Managers. Able to invoke Google Map API to show my home in Google Map in Marketing Jar.

Programming:

9) Successfully write an Android Application to display Google Map. It should not be difficult given my Java background. Localize the application to English, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

Week of August 19 to 25, 2013

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Coursera:
1) Completed Coding Matrix Week 7 lab and Homework. Done with the course and wait for the issuance of the certificate.

10gen:
2) Completed M102 Homework 6. Final Exam will be held next week.
3) Completed M101J Homework 4. Midway through the course.
4) Completed M101JS Homework 2. I am new to Node JS and need to refer to lesson examples to write Node JS programs to perform CRUD operation on MongoDB.
5) Upgrade to MongoDB 2.4.6 in local machine

EDX:
1) Completed Quiz 1. 5 out of 7, decent score.
2) Did not submit Homework 1. Too busy currently and have to drop the course. I downloaded lecture videos of week 2 and 3 and will watch them when I have time.

Udacity:
1) No progress so far. Will watch videos of lecture 2 next week. The course is self-paced, so no pressure to meet deadline.

Programming:
1) Learning how to write JAX-RS web service to retrieve JPA entities from H2 database.
2) Get an overview of Twitter Bootstrap and Knockout JS.

Completed M101P: MongoDB for Developers

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Final exam was submitted on past Thursday and I am waiting for the result to come out next week.  According to the course website, the deadline of the exam is August 6, 9:00 AM HK time; it will be graded by autograder and posted the result in the progress tab of student portal.

I must achieve at least 65% to earn the certificate and it is no easy task. It is because the the weight of the exam is very high, namely 50%. If I underachieve in the final exam, my dream of attaining 10gen certificate will be burst.

The homework average is 42 out of 50; it has gone down a bit because I forgot to hand in assignments of week 1 and week 2. The exam is consisted of 10 questions, so I need to get at least 5 correct answers to achieve my goal.

I am skeptical because there are 3 questions I don’t know the answer. Even though I visit course discussion forum to look for hints and advice, nothing helpful has turned up.  The 5 hand-on questions are straightforward but I have no way of verifying my answers.  The JSON datasets used in the exam are so large that they make checking results extremely time consuming.

My fate rests on the final exam autograder. When next Tuesday arrives, I will know if I pass the course of not. Wish me luck!!!!

 

10gen Education offers new course

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Great news, 10gen will offer a new MongoDB course this August and it will be taught by the marvelous Andrew Erlichson and his teaching staff.

  1. M101JS: MongoDB for Node.js Developers

Some background of JavaScript is required. If you don’t know JavaScript, you can search JavaScript tutorial sites on Google and study the language before the class begins.

Resources on MongoDB and Node.js

July offering of MongoDB courses

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Not getting enough of MongoDB, I also registered M101J and M102 offered in July.

  1. M101J: MongoDB for Java Developers
  2. M102: MongoDB for DBAs

I am going to be super busy this summer but I will enjoy every moment of it.
Did I mention that the courses are free?

Free!!!!

What are you waiting for? Come join me!!!!