Mastering Nuxt Course Review

As stated on the landing page of this course, the goal is to teach you to develop robust, high performant Nuxt apps that are production-ready.

This course is created by Josh Deltener in collaboration with Vue School and Nuxt.js. The important note about this course is that 25% of the sales go directly to supporting the wonderful Nuxt framework. Props to that! 🎉

You can find plenty of information about the course itself on their landing page - MasteringNuxt, but I'll write detailed information about what you'll learn in this course and who is it for specifically, as some tiny bits on the website may be misleading or misinterpreted.

Who is it for?

If this course got you interested because you never used Nuxt? It is a great starting point. There are many tutorials out there for free or at much lower pricing, compared to the price of this course, but the instructor will show you the best practices and teach you some cool stuff along the journey.

However, if you are already familiar with Nuxt and you have used it to build a couple of projects, there's a slight chance that the knowledge the instructor is about to share with you - is close to none. I learned a couple of things from the teacher, only because I never needed to use these things in Nuxt. Everything you're about to learn can already be found in the Nuxt Docs, so if you were hoping to learn some magic tricks of internals "uncovered by the docs", that's not going to happen.

What you'll learn?

You'll learn plenty of things as a beginner, but to summarize in short, you will get good knowledge to:

• Create the app without CLI
• Create plugins and modules
• Create back-end bits and pieces
• Working with various API services (Google, Algolia, Stripe)
• Error handling
• Optimizing requests for performance
• On-page SEO optimization
• Deployment

What you'll build?

You are not going to build an AirBnb clone. Clone is when something is identical to functionality and preferably the looks of it, but that's not the case here. You are going to build some basic functionality of AirBnb, but not the entire app. Let's call it an app that one would propose as a prototype for a startup.

There's a video loop on the landing page, exactly under the "What you will build" section, and that's exactly what you'll build. However, the dashboard of the authenticated user is not shown at all and that's a shame, because the dashboard will be plain. No attention to detail and functionality.

Which package to choose?

There are two options for you to choose between. I personally went with the second option; the $249 package, because of the following:

• Access to source code (because I do not code along with the instructor, I just gather knowledge)
• Access to new updates and material
• Certificate of completion

However, from my experience, the $99 package is a better and more affordable option. Do not let the additions from $249 package fool you. It's not worth it.

Personal thoughts?

After my purchase, I landed on a dashboard. Aside of minor layout issues, their Vimeo implementation is very annoying, and the final certification is quite disappointing!

Here's the list of the flaws that I found:

• Going to full-screen to enjoy content is going to get out of full-screen for every recurring lesson.
• Setting the speed of the video to anything reasonable (I preferred speed of 1.5x) is not going to be persistent and it will always go back to the default speed.
• The instructor's pace is very slow. Watching videos at 1.5x speed was much better, but even then I can't say I enjoyed the course. There just wasn't enough passion and engagement from the instructor.
• If you already used Nuxt extensively, there's a possibility that Josh Deltener is not going to teach you anything new. You may learn how to use some 3rd party API services and/or packages, in case you haven't used them before.
• Certification is useless. It doesn't have any online verification link; it's just a PDF with a signature of a teacher and a producer. Basically, anyone can download your certificate from where you post it, and change the name of who it belongs to. Since it has no verification, nobody could say if one did or did not actually complete the course.

In the end, when I finished the course, I considered asking for a refund, since they offer a "14 days - refund period". I did not do it, because I asked for certification and that process took one week. I believe I still had time for a refund, but it'd be inhumane to ask for it, when I watched all of the lessons and got the certificate.

I believe I'll get more value from this course when they update content, since they are waiting for Nuxt v3 release, that's going to happen very soon! There's a Nuxt Conference on 15th of September, 2021. You can join through NuxtNation. Let's see what's coming!

Also, I reported all of the annoyances that I mentioned in this post to them. Hope they work on them and improve the course platform and certification.