17
Lasoloz
2y

TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.

I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.

I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.

Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.

Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!

So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.

Comments
  • 7
    And here is the second example
  • 6
    Right, this is terrible.
    Also, what in God's name is a "Bean" relating to Java. Is this some unholy NetBeans stuff?
  • 0
    @Ranchonyx It's simply a special name for conventional classes. According to javatpoint.com,

    - It should have a no-arg constructor.

    - It should be Serializable.

    - It should provide methods to set and get the values of the properties, known as getter and setter methods.
  • 1
    I used pluralsight to learn C# a few years back, and the courses were pretty good and the quizzes didn't have stupid mistakes like this.

    I guess mileage differs depending on language.
  • 2
    @Lasoloz What the fuck. I have never heard of that. I mean, an empty constructor is generally provided on compilation AFAIK. Getter and setter methods are good practice but you don't always need to have them for every single attribute.
  • 1
    @Ranchonyx Yes, you are right, an empty constructor is provided, if no other constructor exists. I think these conditions are important for serialization purposes. So if one system sends a bean to another system, then one can serialize it correctly and the other can deserialize it correctly. If I'm not mistaken, it's just an extension of the POJO concept with serialization.
  • 3
    Is duo-lingo teaching programming languages now?
  • 0
    @nitnip Or Duolingo copying Stackoverflow questions and answers.
  • 1
    @Ranchonyx I never thought Bean terminology comes loaded with that empty constructor and serialization.

    I always thought it was just a thematic name for class/object (as in Java/Coffee Beans).

    If the serialization is implied in Beans it should be enforced by an interface or an abstraction. Also two different revisions of same class (Bean) would break (un) marshalling hence the need for ProtBuffs (e. g. two deployments not updated at the same time but talking to each other via HTTP or CORBA)
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