Review of Learn Github Actions for CI/CD DevOps Pipelines Course

Introduction¶

I received a coupon code for Houssem Dellai's Learn Github Actions for CI/CD DevOps Pipelines Course. I've written about GitLab runners and the CI/CD process of that tool in the past. I've used GitHub actions to check this blog for broken links. I've used TravisCI (and written why not to trust TravisCI). I've used and BitBucket Pipelines in my professional life. I wanted to learn a big more about what GitHub Actions could do and the coupon code made this 4 hour course worth the time to investigate.

You'll see below in more detail, but this course was not what I expected. It's advertised as being for "All beginners" and "Ops experts". I argue that both of these are incorrect. This course felt more like a 20-30 lecture "GitHub Actions Cookbook" than a course looking to explain GitHub actions.

Let's go through it...

Course Overview¶

There are multiple formats the instructor uses in this course. It's pretty obvious that the sections in this lecture were recorded independantly. Some lectures take place entirely within the GitHub interface, some are using Powerpoint slides to drive the lecture, one is done on a whiteboard. To me, it seems the various lectures have been bundled together.

After a bit of research - and a mid-lecture "Check out my YouTube" - it's clear why that feeling exists. The lectures are available on YouTube. Not all of the videos on YouTube are part of this course, but scrolling through, I can quickly see that many of the videos in the course are on YouTube.

As for the content of the course, it doesn't match what I was expecting. With the "All beginners" advertisement, I was expecting more discussion and coverage on why certain things were being done. A discussion on the trade offs or the instructor's through process on how to accomplish tasks.

Instead, the content is a lot of "this is my code to accomplish this task". It is a great course to get the quick run down of how to accomplish tasks, especially with Azure. However, it is not a good course if you want to know why a specific block of code is the best route to go. It's a cookbook to accomplish a task. A handful of lectures do cover theory, but these are few and very far between.

Conclusion¶

If my coupon hadn't knocked off the entire price of the course, I'd be upset with this one. I also picked up two other courses by this instructor and I suspect I'm going to find similar concerns with those courses. Honestly, that's to bad, because the content is good. It's just not marketed how it's packaged. With my expectations set for learning a bit, it's disappointing to get lectures that are designed to be copy and pasted from.

Don't come into this expecting to learn a lot of reasoning behind how things are accomplished. If you need an overview of how to accomplish the tasks in the content list though, you'll find that. It'll be a relatively dry walkthrough of the exact code you need. But, if you want to know why...this isn't the course for you.

If you can find a coupon code for this, I think it's worth your time to see how some of these advanced tasks are accomplished. If you can't find that coupon though, head over to the instructor's YouTube page and watch that section for free.