Publish Date - September 14th, 2022
|Last Modified - October 23rd, 2023
With over 52 million users a year, ~70000 course instructors almost 200,000 online courses and growing, Udemy has grown substantially over the last 2 years due to COVID.
Due to COVID-19, Udemy saw an increase of 425% student enrollments, 55% increase in course creation and 80% increase in usage from governments and businesses
With that in mind, it only makes sense that Udemy is and for a long time in the future, one of the most popular massive open online courses in the world.
Check out the top Udemy courses now!
Why I like Udemy and why I wrote this article
One of the main reasons why I chose to create this article is the lack of in-depth content outlining the best Udemy courses. While most content creators will create a list of the “best Udemy courses”, very few content creators on Google actually take the courses themselves. In contrast, I take a vast majority of the courses or at the very least buy, audit and return the courses if it’s not for me.
I use Udemy religiously, trying new courses every week while trying to grow my skills in project management, web development, automation, business, marketing and anything else I can learn. Coupled with a fantastic price and fairly competent instructors, it only makes sense that others like using Udemy.
Overall, I’ve probably done 50+ Udemy courses over the 5 or 6 accounts I’ve owned.
I’ve also used learning platforms like Coursera, Freecodecamp.org, Udacity and Lynda (LinkedIn Learning). So I have a good base to compare to when it comes to massive online open courses (MooCs).
William’s Note: For a majority of these courses, I’ve finished the course, started them or audited them and returned the course, because I didn’t care for that particular topic. As online learners, you’ll see that every course on this list may not be to your liking, but the overall structure and course itself is sound.
I’ve also created my own Udemy courses as well. Check out what I’ve done so far!
https://www.udemy.com/user/william-chin-fook-2/
My Criteria that I look at when analyzing top Udemy courses
I use 6 criteria for analyzing whether a course is high quality on Udemy.
- Instructor – When I look at a course, I research the instructor extensively. I look at their LinkedIn, websites and online properties they own, and also what they are doing currently (their pedigree, work history etc). For example, there’s a lot of instructors that claim to be able to do SEO, but their website hasn’t or doesn’t rank for anything? Why not practice what you preach? In my mind, this calls into question the validity of their course.
- Ratings, Students and Reviews – An obvious one to say the least, the worse the rating and lower the review count, the weaker the chance of me actually taking this course or even reviewing it. I also like to compare other reviews, ratings and students to other courses.
- Assignments, course material, quizzes and homework – One of the defining features of Udemy is it’s ability to embed course material. If this platform was meant to just be videos you can watch, you’re better off watching tutorials on YouTube instead. Therefore, the courses should be immersive.
- Nomenclature of the Units, Topics and Chapters – Having a good syllabus is crucial to effective online learning. Did the course creator just pile a bunch of slides and voice-overs together and call it a course? Or, was there a methodology / strategy on how they compiled the chapters and slides together, to help better aid the student?
- Updates, Changelog and responsive to questions – I’ve taken some fantastic courses over my Udemy addiction, but sadly many course creators move on to other things and don’t update their course anymore. Having an updated, current course is extremely important since you don’t want to teach old skills. As an addendum to that, responding to comments and question and answer (QnA) is very important as well for me.
- Hands-on learning or tutorial – Both of these have their advantages, and some students will prefer a specific type. Whether it’s a self-learning or a step-by-step, “how to do X to see Y” – will be dictated by the person taking the course. That being said, I still hope to see some level of engagement by the student from the course.
Other things like length of the course, quality of the speaker and their actual slides / demonstrations and real world examples are all taken to account as well.
At the end, I’ll give a 3 – 4 sentence verdict of each course and whether you should take it.
Here are my 15 Best Udemy courses for lifetime learners
Note: There are affiliate links above and below to Udemy and other parties that I may receive commissions from. However, I highly recommend these products due to the fact that I’ve audited or taken them before. Please click through and support my website so that I don’t need to run Ads :).
Best Python Course – 2022 Complete Python Bootcamp From Zero to Hero in Python
I completed this course in October 2022.
I have also reviewed a wide variety of different Python courses on Udemy. check it out if you’re interested.
Overview:
The introduction and onboarding is solid. You use Anaconda which has access to a number of libraries (Spyder, R Studio, Juypter labs and Juypter notebooks. He’ll also review Spyder and Pycharm, which are extremely popular IDEs.
Jose’s got most of his tutorials on GitHub – which you can fork the repository or just download the zip file. https://github.com/Pierian-Data/Complete-Python-3-Bootcamp. There’s even a lesson on Github.com and GIT.
Data types that are covered; Integers, Floating point, Strings, Data structures [Lists, Dictionaries, Tuples, Sets, Booleans].
Great walkthrough on how to interact with files. Functions like .read(), .readlines(), pwd are regular skills that you necessary for strong python programming.
zip(), inumerate(), mykey() and a number tools important for a programmer.
Will cover things like importing libraries and also creating your own functions, classes and methods.
After that basic stuff, he will dive into object orientated programming, error handling, decorators and generators before diving into actual applicable things with Python (web scraping, email creation, PDFs, CSVs and image manipulation).
Pros
- Great summation slides which sum up entire chapters and are good to refer to. Also, Jose is a pro at walking through complicated subjects in the simplest way.
- Three plus hours of methods and functions (this was a great chapter).
- Fantastic milestone projects which appear at the perfect time during the length of the course:
- A tic-tac-toe game (utilizing functions only)
- The “war” card game (With classes, methods and tons of functions) and then BlackJack.
- A list of projects you can choose from (over 100)
- Good call outs to more unique modules, libraries and tool kits (Lambda, Filters, Maps, LEGB rule and other things).
- The coding exercises and quizzes are practical and help you build foundational skills.
- Great cadence to the flow of the course. It is structured like this: Explains a topic with slides -> Practice the topic in Jupyter notebooks -> Do a quiz / test / assignment.
- Lots of work in Jupyter notebooks, all of his work is in GitHub so you can fork the repo or download the ZIP and run it directly in Juypter notebooks (nice touch).
Cons:
- He has a 15 minute lecture on Anaconda and all of the different IDEs including web ones, this felt like it was unnecessary.
- Only 1.5 hours hands on looping or conditionals, there should be more practice on this.
- The course hasn’t been updated in almost 8 months, so some of the versioning is out of date.
- The final milestone was not really a milestone. It was more, “choose your own project” instead.
WHY DO I THINK IT’s THE BEST PYTHON COURSE ON UDEMY
When it comes to this being the best Python course, here’s why Jose Portilla’s course takes the cake:
Instructor – Jose Portilla is the head of data science at Pierian Training. He’s very skilled at Mat lab, Machine learning and Python with over 54 courses in this discipline on Udemy alone. While his GitHub is not very active, he may be committing to many private repos. He is also constantly publishing new business intelligence, SQL and Python course monthly. With over 41k+ followers on LinkedIn, you can believe that Jose is the real deal with it comes to data science, machine learning and Python.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – This course has 430K+ ratings, 1.6+ million students and a 4.6 rating / 5. The closest course to this is Dr. Angela Yu’s 100 Days of Python coding, which only has ~140k students but a rating of 4.7 / 5. Jose can literally say he’s helping millions of people to learn Python.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – This course has a lot exercises and articles – but no homework. The first two projects (Tic Tac Toe and Black Jack) have full solution walkthroughs, with them both having warm-up projects to help grow and ramp up your skills beforehand. The last capstone project has a repository of over 100 Python projects that you can learn and grow your skills from.
Breakdown of the course – This course is broken up like most Python introductory courses with the following structure; set-up, data structures, logic, Statements (Loops, If, elif etc.), object orientated programming and then more advanced concepts. Ultimately, the course has a great ramp-up with the only discrepancy being course material and the Milestone Projects. I found the second Milestone project quite difficult, and needed a lot of support from Juypter notebook cheat sheet.
Updates, Changelog and responsive to questions – Probably one of the biggest negatives of this course, is it hasn’t been updated in longer than a year. Python has went through a lot of changes in 2022, and I expect there to be a lot more in 2023. While his TA’s aren’t completely out-of-the-loop, I’ve seen some questions unanswered for years.
Hands on learning or tutorial? – This course is one of the most hands-on I’ve done. Jose really tries to blend in-classroom textbook teaching, with hands-on coding. A perfect example of this is when Jose teaches Python methods (regarding classes). Jose goes through args and **kwargs concepts so well, it’s cemented into my brain. During that lesson, he takes half the chapter to provide you with metaphors and less abstract concepts so that you can have a basic understanding of the concept. Similarly, when preparing the second Milestone Project, instead of Jose just dumping you into the project – he does a completely separate project to the blackjack game. He walks you through how to create the game “War”, so that you get used to the logic of working with players, a deck and cards (each with their respective classes and methods).
What do students say?
Good course for beginners and intermediate students. Everything is well explained and the course is really fun, if you work around the problems/exercises, in your own way. I really do wish that it included a milestone project 3 though, with project logic explanation and solution, like Milestone Project 2. The lack of that is the only reason for deducting a star. But overall, if you want to learn Python from the scratch, this is the way.
Nevil Chrispin N. – 4 / 5 stars – August 2023
Yes, it was a good match for me. I got to learn Python from basic to advanced because of this course. It was an excellent course. Thank you very much for this course.
Dnyanesh M. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Verdict:
Definitely take this course if you want to learn Python. I’ve taken Python courses on Coursera, Freecodecamp and Udacity, and Jose’s course is the best. Whether you’re an engineer or business person trying to branch out your skills, this course is worth it.
Start your Python Journey now!
Best Web Development Course – The Web developer bootcamp by Colt Steele
I’ve done probably 6 or 7 web developer Udemy bootcamps, building all sorts of apps. While I’ve purchased this course and audited it, I haven’t completed it yet. . In my article, the best web development courses on Udemy – I go over a number of high profile, high quality web development courses on Udemy.
My Agency account 
One of my personal accounts
Overview of Colt’s course:
Titled “The Web Developer Bootcamp 2022”, Colt’s course is long and covers a lot! I’m taking this course right now (the screenshot above is from his YelpCamp creation), specifically on middleware and routes. Colt’s English is flawless, he’s very descriptive when it comes to breaking down concepts, and will take an entire lesson to explain a tiny concept. Be ready to spend quite a bit of time learning all of the basics of JS from scratch, HTML (semantic layout) and CSS (flexbox and responsiveness), bootstrap, AJAX, APIs, NPM, Node.js, Restful Routes, Express and (NoSQL) MongoDB. It’s a true frontend development course, with a twist.
Pros:
- Very descriptive content when it comes to Javascript
- Detailed walkthrough on the basics of Javascript, especially if you’re new to coding
- Very clear videos and instructional concepts
- Amazing project (YelpCamp)
- I love the way he handles the breakdown of how components work with each other – this really helped me understand how JS works
- Awesome in-depth dive into JS backend/server side
- Great buildup overall – truly a zero to hero bootcamp
Cons:
- I was disappointed that there is no Angular or React framework mentioned
- While there is a one-hour terminal (bash) chapter, I believe he missed out on crucial GIT lessons
- While the YelpCamp project is amazing and thorough, it accounts for a third of the actual course. It would have been good to have more than one major project covered in the course.
Why is it the best Web development course on Udemy?
Instructor – Similar to Jose Portilla, Colt Steele has taught and created well almost 2 dozen courses (21) which has a total of 1.3+ million students and 415k+ reviews. This is his official job (Teacher / developer) and has taught on Udacity as well. He’s been in web development for 10+ years, so you know he’s got a lot of experience. In 2016, he was voted Udemy’s best New Instructor. He’s very active on Github, with a commits to public repositories all the time.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – An extremely popular web developer course, Colt has 817k+ students with almost 250k reviews. With a 4.7 / 5 rating, he’s slightly ahead of Dr. Angela Yu’s web development course (4.7 / 5 rating with 221k+ reviews) and hundreds of thousands of reviews ahead of Jonas Schmedtmann’s and Maximilian Schwarzmuller’s courses (both good web development course creators in their own right).
Assignments, course material, quizzes and homework – Due to this course being 64 hours, there are so many exercises and downloadable materials. Going through this course is actually exhausting. That being said, the exercises are fairly easy to understand with the whole course climaxing to the final project, the Yelp camp project.
Breakdown of the course – The beauty of the course is the breakdown.
If you’re a newbie to web development – this course has a very strong educational process:
- Basics of Web development (Front-end vs. backend, Request and responses)
- HTML (Semantic layout, tags, elements (<hr>, <br>, <div>, <span>), forms, tables.
- CSS (Selectors, Flexbox, Transitions, bootstrap) <- with an awesome lesson on the position: attribute.
- JavaScript (A full course in vanilla JavaScript)
- AJAX and APIs
- NPM and Express
- Restful routes
- MongoDB
Updates, Changelog and responsiveness to questions – With regular updates, this course has constantly added more and more since I purchased it in Mar. 03, 2021. Colt continues to add more and more (like his recent addition to JavaScript function writing in ES6), to this course and my hope is he adds a few hours on React and maybe Next.js, as they become more prevalent of framework. Due to this being his fulltime job, Colt and his TA’s do a good job answering questions, especially Ian.
Hands on learning or tutorial – This course is much more of a tutorial, despite having a lot of exercises. Colt will show you some things, then walk you through how to build it. Therefore, you can technically go in auto-pilot, and may not retain as much knowledge you should.
What do students say?
I learned a lor. I felt at times Colt went faster than I could keep up, but after rewatching some videos, I got a better understanding of what he was trying to get across.
William B. – 5 /5 stars – September 2023
I started this course with no background in web development or any other tech field. I knew absolutely nothing (emphasis on nothing). Now, after completing this course, I have an understanding of the topic and the foundation to grow further. Before starting, I knew that I wanted to code but I didn’t know where to start. I thought the only thing I needed to do was learn a language and boy was I wrong. If your looking to learn to code (specifically web development) look no further as this is a great outline.
Joey R. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Verdict:
Colt’s course is a great course to learn general web development. The procedural approach to the course will have you growing your skills in each lesson. The only drawback to this course is the lack of modern frameworks like React, Next.js or Ruby on Rails.
Learn Web Development with Colt Steele
Best JavaScript Course on Udemy- The Complete JavaScript Course: From Zero to Expert!
William’s Note: Also covered in my “best web developer course on Udemy”, is a write up of one of the best Vanilla JS courses on Udemy. I also never finished this course – and don’t plan to. This is a very specific and long course, focused on teaching Vanilla JS – which I don’t have an interest in mastering as a programming language :).
Overview of Jonas’ Course:
This is Jonas Schmedtmann’s 70-hour Javascript course that goes from absolute JS zero – “hello world” – to developing your own document object model (DOM) updating algorithm and using APIs to create your own recipe uploading application. Jonas also dedicates an hour of GIT lessons and how to deploy your product to a Netlify environment. With recent updates accounting for ES2021 and ES2022 JS versions – this course is extremely thorough in teaching you vanilla Javascript.
Pros:
- So much JavaScript – Jonas will truly turn you into a zero to hero in JS
- Whereas Colt Steele’s course touched on HTML, CSS and the DOM, Jonas’ course starts out with JS values and variables and has a brief touch base on foundational dev skills like HTML, and CSS.
- A FIVE-hour lesson on Async/Await, Promises and AJAX – best set of lectures I’ve seen on this topic yet
- A SIX-hour lesson on Arrays
- Very detailed walkthroughs and diagrams of more ambiguous JavaScript concepts, such as prototypal inheritance, Babel, and polyfilling
- One major application build from scratch (Forkify)
- GIT training and an entire two-hour section on good development practices, prettifying, and debugging (first time I’ve seen this)
Cons:
- Very little work up to coding. Jonas does a tiny crash course in HTML and CSS, but it’s not enough to actually train a person
- The course is sooooooo long… I honestly could only get through a little bit less than half. I’m pretty certain that this is more vanilla JS than taught in university.
- For such a long JS course, I expected at least some introductions to React, Angular, or a framework like Next.js – but that didn’t happen. However, Jonas did touch on NPM, Babel, and ES6.
Why is it the best JS course?
Instructor – I’ve taken a Jonas’ course to learn SASS / CSS and Flexbox. This course is as equally well thought out and procedural as that one. Jonas has almost 1.5 million students and is a Udemy instructor partner. While he only has 5 courses, they’re all high quality, bestsellers and none of them rate below 4.5 / 5 rating. Jonas’ Github is extremely active, with dozens of commits across his repos.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – While Jonas’ courses have less reviewers than Jose’s or Colt’s, they are all highly rated. His JavaScript bootcamp course has a 4.8 / 5 rating with 150k+ reviews, no other course on Udemy can even compare. Analyzing Udemy’s search results, when looking for a “JavaScript course”, web developer bootcamp courses from Dr. Angela Yu and Colt Steele show-up under Jonas’.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – While there is the creation of some apps (Forkify, Mapty), there’s very little in way of quizzes or extra learning, the course says 25 challenges, but they’re not very comprehensive. That being said, there’s a 1 hour crash course on Git which can be very useful to new web developer enthusiasts.
Breakdown of the course – For a JS course, this course ramps up very quickly. You’ll do some HTML / CSS for 1 hour and then go right into DOM manipulation with JS. From there, you’ll be immersed in Data structures, functions and arrays for over 15 hours. While this is fantastic if you want to learn Javascript, I didn’t have the patience to handle that.
Updates, Changelog and responsiveness to questions – Very immersive and well updated to cover JS in ES2021 and ES2022.
Hands on learning or tutorial? More of a tutorial again, where you will walk through everything yourself but have Jonas’ future slides as a reference / answer. While this has pros and cons, I will admit that the mind numbing amount of JavaScript you will be doing (it’s well over 70 hours) – ends up making you fairly proficient at coding in JavaScript.
What do students say?
Without a doubt, it is an excellent course. If you are at the beginning of a college or technical course and need to improve your JavaScript skills, this course will be very useful for you. You will certainly stand out. I just regret not having taken an HTML course before to be able to put into practice everything I learned during classes, but that is exclusively my problem.
Pedro Henrique Ferreira A. – 5 / 5 stars – September 2023
I really enjoyed learning JavaScript from Jonas. He explains everything in very simple language. I tried other instructor’s JS courses before and I have found this comparatively far far better. I hope Jonas also makes new courses on JS frameworks so that we can learn and clear our understandings. Thanks Jonas and team.
Saad Been Abdul A. – 5 / 5 stars – July 2023
Verdict:
Do you want to learn JavaScript? This is the course to learn JavaScript. If you don’t want a JavaScript bootcamp for 100+ hours or more of your time, don’t take this course. Jonas has other good courses as well, mostly in the front-end experience.
Build your JavaScript skills now!
Best WordPress Developer course – Become a WordPress Developer: Unlocking Power With Code by Brad Schiff
Overview:
This is a 42-hour, comprehensive WordPress from scratch development course featuring the following in-depth units:
- In-depth analysis of how WordPress works and a general lesson about PHP.
- A breakdown of WordPress specific functions (this is extremely important in my opinion since it differentiates WordPress from other content management systems. You’ll look at how WordPress builds pages vs. traditional HMTL websites).
- How to build post-types, user roles, comments, and internal site search.
- Plugin development.
- How to deploy a WordPress website to production.
- Blocks, Gutenberg and React.
- Theme development.
With tons of resources and additional material, it’s quite the comprehensive WordPress course.
Pros:
- Glad to see over 12 hours devoted to block/theme-related development. My site is built in a custom WordPress theme, so I know quite a bit about it.
- Good ramp up for someone who has no WordPress experience. From PHP > WordPress PHP > WordPress architecture > Blocks > Full Custom block themes and templates.
- Good length for a Udemy bootcamp – 40 hours seems to be the sweet spot
- Brad Schiff is a great teacher – very easy to understand and an extremely thorough coach
Cons:
- I can see a lot of people struggling if you’ve never developed anything before. It’s tough to pick up PHP right off the bat (even if it’s just a few “echos”), so some more ramp up from “zero” so that you can become a “hero” would’ve been nice.
- While it’s becoming deprecated, I would’ve liked to see more course material on how WordPress specific functions are made available to developers to allow them to build faster. WordPress is powerful because of its ability to add hooks and filters. While blocks negate this in the future, it’s not completely dead.
- While there’s a 1.5 hour lecture on WordPress’ REST API, more people are using WordPress as a headless CMS solution. This can be a separate course since most people use Gatsby to accomplish this (a course in itself).
- There should be a tutorial on command-line interface for WordPress (WP-CLI) (IT’S AMAZING).
Why is it the best WordPress course?
Instructor – Brad Schiff is a self-employed development educator on the YouTube channel LearnWebCode.com. He has 15+ years of experience in web development, and more than 75+ active commits in Github for his own courses and other stacks in the last 6 months. His development skills include, HTML, CSS, JS, React, PHP, MySQL and Laravel and jQuery, which is a testament to his skills as a full-stack developer.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – Not as popular as some of the aforementioned course creators, Brad still has almost 200k students for his seven courses. His WordPress web developer course has almost 20k reviews with a 4.8 / 5 rating, one of the highest in this article!
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – This 42 hour course is long and doesn’t have a lot in the sense of quizzes or homework. That being said, if you want to learn how to code your own PHP website from scratch, with modern React blocks curtesy of Gutenberg, this is the course for you to take.
Breakdown of the course – This course ramps up pretty fast, right into PHP and how to build sections of your content management system, and then a little bit of JS preparation. A lot of the HTML and CSS you’ll use, Brad gives to you VIA downloadable files. This isn’t the greatest, since his CMS is pretty barebones. The course finishes off with how to build your own WordPress plugins, deploying the website and how to make your own slider.
Updates, Changelog and course creator responsiveness – The course is fairly well updated, especially since Gutenberg and block building in React is only a few years old. That being said, Brad has recently added content to cover this and more in his course. There seems to be a lack of responsiveness, especially to negative reviews and the QnA section.
Hands on learning or tutorial? – This course is definitely a tutorial.
What do students say?
The author is really a very good teacher and I can tell that he has a lot of experience as a teacher. It is very easy to follow (even for non native-english), the different topics are looked at from different angles and the author’s opinion is explained very well. Really recommend this course.
Christian R. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
When one takes a Udemy course you never know what to expect. I’ve bought some pretty bad courses in my time and got my money back, but this was a good one.Often I question if Udemy is a good place for me to learn in terms of the time it takes up. You sit through so many videos which can take me months. I hang on every word, not necessarily believing all of the words fully until I’ve done a little bit of my own research, but I at least want the first cut of knowledge. However, the fact that I live in Udemy, start to question if I’m wasting my life because I’ve been studying many, many different things on it for years is not the fault of the instructor. This course was done in a friendly, occasionally cheesy, but fruitful way. Initially when I got into web development and learned the base tools, HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript I never liked WordPress. I’d only seen people use other people’s themes and bastardise them. I learned much later that you can use it for your clients – if you’re lucky enough to be able to get them – for things like the blogging engine or allowing users to edit their own fields to change their own website and that’s all I used it for. This course has taught me a lot more than that. It has taught be how to safely output data, it’s solidified my knowledge of the page hierarchy, it’s taught me to use the WordPress official JavaScript stuff because before I was using Laravel Mix for my SCSS which annoys me because it makes a sound every time I save my files. It’s taught me about page parent and child relationships. Allowing users to edit the navigation options. It’s taught me about traditional plugin development as well as using React for such things, block development as plugins, block development and full site editing. It’s taught me vast amounts about WordPress and I needed the help because yes, it’s a very useful tool, but I needed a course that would give me a shove because in the end, I’d rather use React exclusively and not develop websites at all. But for when a client comes to me with a need for a new theme, full site and block based or otherwise, I will be prepared. I’m still rather tempted to create my own tables even though he recommends using posts most of the time; I suppose it’s just more like traditional development.
Ash D. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Verdict:
This is a long and tough course to get through. Plus, there’s a lot of PHP which most folks won’t be comfortable with in the beginning. That being said, it’s a top-down WordPress tutorial which you need to understand WordPress hooks, actions and filters, React and PHP to master. Take this course if you’re interested in WordPress engineering else, don’t bother taking it!
Build a custom WordPress template with React blocks now!
Best SQL course – The Complete SQL Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero by Jose Portilla
William’s Note: I have finished this course recently, just to showcase my SQL prowess :). That being said, it was overall easy to go through in one weekend.
This is one of many SQL course I completed on Udemy. You can see more on my review of the best SQL courses on Udemy.
Overview:
This 9 hour course has a variety of things that make it a top notch SQL bootcamp.
- A ramp up from zero-to-hero. The ramp-up is fairly slow, but it’s an easy to understand / methodological approach to learning a coding language.
- After every section there’s a challenge, here’s an example of the Chapter two challenge. It may seem easy, but you end up building the muscle memory you need.
- You cover a good set of advanced concepts like joins (including union), mathematical operators, subqueries, procedures and conditionals.
- There’s a small project at the end of course, with large 30 minute assessment tests after every three chapters.
- There’s also some python at the end mixed in with your querying so that you can get a taste for the data science or machine learning side side of the SQL.
Above is the schema of the database that you will be working with, this is a complex database!
Pros:
- Great compact course, not too long and not too short.
- Great workbook material and data resources (practice database is a good size)
- Awesome ramp-up for the course (a true zero to hero)
- Good test, quizzes and exercises
- Jose is very well-spoken (in english) and articulates himself quite well when teaching
- The section pacing was perfect – “group by” and SQL fundamentals (SELECT, COUNT etc..) are fairly easy concepts which can be covered in two hours. Whereas having JOINS and UNIONS with their own 1.5 hour section each, allows you to get the practice you need.
Cons:
- While there was good coverage on create, read, update, delete (CRUD) queries, I think there could have been more theoretical overview on how DBs work and what SQL does (only a small 8 minute session).
- They cover procedures and JOINs, but no user-defined functions? User-defined functions are an extremely important concept for SQL. The ability to pass and store variables is an extremely important skill to learn for SQL.
- There was also nothing on views or triggers as well.
- It would have been nice for Jose to cover MySQL, Microsoft SQL server (MS SQL) or even Oracle since the syntax is different, everything is Postgresql based.
Why is it the best SQL course?
Instructor – It’s Jose Portilla again! I’ve already covered his accolades so read above on his Python course. One thing I didn’t notice originally is – he gives out coupons to his other courses, so please feel free to purchase his course with an even bigger discount!
Ratings, Reviews and Students – Already covered generally, but for this specific course – Jose does it again with a rating of 4.7 / 5 with almost 150k ratings. With well over half a million students, this is easy one to complete, but still a comprehensive SQL course. There are a few SQL courses that come close to Jose’ rating, but the sheer simplicity of this course makes up for that.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – While the assignments weren’t that difficult, I loved the pace of the tests and “assessments” that Jose has. While this course focuses on Postgres, it actually blends well with other SQL specific courses as well.
Breakdown of the course – Perfect breakdown for an SQL course, especially for a novice SQLer:
- Introduction to the course, fundamentals of SQL (SELECT, WHERE, DISTINCT, LIMIT and LIKE (my favorite))
- Group By and Having
- ASSESSMENT
- JOINS (Inner, Outer, AS, UNION)
- ASSESSMENT
- SubQuery, String and Math manipulations
- ASSESSMENT
- CRUD
- ASSESSMENT
- Conditionals and Stored Procedures
The only thing I think this course missed out on in fundamentals of SQL are INTERSECTs and integrations with software like Tableau. Also, maybe a chapter on how normal Postgres differs from MySQL or SQL server would be nice. The REGEXP function is MySQL is far superior than the LIKE, despite potentially burning a hole in your processor :).
Updates, Changelog and Instructor responsiveness – Consistently updated. However, this course is a fundamentals course, and I can’t see the fundamentals of SQL change drastically. Jose is very responsive in this course, answering and supporting a variety of students with their problems in the QnA.
Hands on learning or tutorial? This is a hands-on learning, coupled with a tutorial. The process of watching slides and following along, then doing an assessment of that knowledge, is a tried and tested strategy for e-learning.
What do students say?
I think what is missing is a section on why and how data are connected together in a relational database. For instance the concept of “Normal forms” as well as the relationship between tables “many to many”, “one to many” etc… But overall it is solid content.
Komi H A. – 4 / 5 stars – September 2023
My experience was quite positive. The course provided an in-depth exploration of PostgreSQL, covering a wide range of topics that catered to beginners and those with prior database management experience.
Ahmad N. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Verdict:
Mon dieu.. Take this course if you need to learn SQL, it’s a great short course you can learn from, isn’t too tough to master in a weekend, and is a great gateway into the world of coding. A definite buy for someone with no technical background.
Learn SQL with Jose Portilla now!
Best Graphic design course on Udemy – Graphic Design Masterclass – Learn GREAT Design by Lindsay Marsh
Overview:
A course designed to help learn the theoretical and the practical concepts for graphic design, Lindsay Marsh gives an in-depth look into animations, general graphic manipulation and web design. In this course you’ll end up looking at:
- Graphic Design Theory
- Adobe Photoshop (Basic, Intermediate and Expert)
- Specific skills like YouTube thumbnail design and book cover design
- Website mock-ups
- Illustrator (Logo design, branding theory)
- InDesign
- Design trends for (2022, 2021, 2020).
This course blends practical with theory + mixing in expert opinion of someone with almost two decades of design experience.
Pros:
- Pretty in-depth course, with lots of examples and lectures to follow along with.
- Good updates to the content, with a changelog explaining what’s been updated.
- Lindsay provides expert opinion on material as individual slides, which is comforting and real.
- The slides are fantastic quality!
Cons:
- You need to have Adobe suite to actually take this course.
- The theory is definitely great in this course and so is the practical, but this course is extremely long!
- The software Lindsay uses is old, which means there some incompatibility of products in new content.
Why is it the best graphic design course on Udemy?
Instructor – Lindsay Marsh is a self-made owner of her own business going on 15+ years, where she provides marketing / design services to clients all over the US. Over the last 2 years, she’s become a Udemy Instructor with over ~300k students and 14 courses. While her time as a consultant has been long, her pedigree is half-decent. The only thing I think she lacks is experience in a corporate or enterprise design position.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – This course has just over 41k ratings with a fantastic 4.7 / 5 stars rating. No other course on Udemy regarding design has this.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – This is all solid, with good content throughout.
Breakdown of the course – This is also very solid!
Updates, Changelog and Instructor responsiveness – The course is regularly updated, with Lindsay or TA answering many of the questions in the QnA.
Hands on learning or tutorial? Ultimately, it’s a little bit of both!
What do students say?
This course has change my life. Great course.
Chandan J. – 5 / 5 stars – Sept 2023
The instructor has created an awesome and exciting course! It not only explains all of the necessary theory needed for one to begin to understand graphic design, it also shows tons of examples of professional work, gives ideas for student portfolio projects, keeps the student engaged with hands-on projects, and explains the niches one needs to understand to begin to enter the field.
Cyrus M. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Verdict:
If you want a good graphic design course on Udemy, look no further – full stop.
Learn Graphic design with Lindsay Marsh Now!
Best React course on Udemy – React – The Complete Guide (incl Hooks, React Router, Redux)
William’s Note: Maximilian Schwarzmüller is a great instructor, and I’m enrolled in this course trying to learn React as best as I can. That being said, it’s a tough framework to pick-up if you’re weak in JavaScript (which I am). As an aside, Maximilian is a strong Udemy instructor, so this would be the course to try learn React.
Another course on this list by Maximilian Schwarzmuller, this 50+ hour course gives you a crash course on “everything you need to know” about React. With this course updated for React 18, you’re able to take a condensed version of the course (4+ hours) or the whole course (40+ hours).
The course starts out with what React.js is, how it works and single page applications (SPAs) with a small crash course in Javascript. Afterwards, you’ll work through multiple projects, custom react hooks (no need for classes anymore :P), how to build class base components (for reusability), Redux, React with http + forms, authentication, Unit tests with React and Typescript.
Pros:
- This is the most in-depth, well rated course on Udemy for React and it doesn’t disappoint
- You’ll be exposed to many different types of necessary things needed to make React work.
- React hooks lesson seems great (released in React 16.8). It lets you use state and other React features without writing a class, Maximilian does a great job explaining and teaching these.
- 4 projects is a good amount of training
- The Multi-page SPA with React Router was the best lessonI buzzed through so far.
Cons:
- Honestly, I’m a noob at React and while there’s a lot of videos – it feels like there’s too much. I won’t be surprised if it takes me the rest of this year to finish this course.
- This is not for noobs, if you’ve never coded in object-orientated languages – do not take this course. You will struggle through it.
- I would have loved a lesson on Mongo, Express and Node. This is a pure React course, but very rarely do developers use just React to build applications.
- While I’m used to the way he speaks, but some reviewers say it can be hard to understand Maximilian due to English not being his first language.
Why is it the best React course?
Instructor – I mentioned Maximilian Schwarzmuller, as someone who has created many Udemy courses for a reason. Maximilian has almost 15 years of experience in development, with experience in large consulting companies (KPMG, PwC and McKinsey) where he became a consultant and now runs his own consulting company. With skills in all things web development and AWS certified, Maximilian has over 51 courses on Udemy ranging from Angular, Docker and K8s to more niche courses like Stencil.js. He has over 2.1 million students and has received a review on 800k+ of them.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – For this React course, he’s received a 4.6 / 5 rating with over 160k ratings. The next best course that even comes close to this notoriety and usage, is Stephen Grinder’s “Modern React w/ Redux” which has almost half the amount of students and reviews, while boasting the same rating.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – Learn a skill, then do a small quiz followed by multiple projects provided by Max, this is the structure of the course. From a content standpoint, you’ll dive head first into React.
Breakdown of the course – This course gives you a small crash course in JavaScript, then jumps right into React. You’ll learn so much your head will spin :).
Updates, Changelog and instructor responsiveness – It’s updated to React 18, which is a good start since some of the courses I’ve audited only cover up to React 16. I will admit that while he replies to the QnA, he doesn’t actually provide solutions or changes based on customer feedback, which is definitely a negative.
Hands on learning or tutorial? More of a tutorial, but the projects are very wholesome and Maximilian focuses on providing very long in-depth explanations and examples of all the topics covered. Some of this chapters could be considered courses.
What do students say?
To keep things short, This course is named ‘React – The Complete Guide’ it is that but with the BEST TEACHER. Thanks to Maximilian for this awesome Course!
Md. Shariul Islam T. – 5 /5 stars – August 2023
Absolutely phenomenal React course! Max is an exceptional teacher who provides a rock-solid foundation right from the beginning, paving the way for a deep understanding of the subject matter by the end. Highly recommended for anyone looking to gain comprehensive knowledge in React. Kudos to Max and the entire course team!
Abhiman R. – 5 / 5 stars – July 2023
Verdict:
I bought this course intending to try to finish in a month. If you have a full time job, a serious hobby or even a child, this is a tough course to finish. Maybe it’s due to my weak JS skills, or the fact that this is one hell of a React bootcamp, that I am struggling to finish it. If you have the stomach and the time to take this course, feel free to dive into the world of React.
Begin your React experience with Maximilian Schwarzmuller
Best Digital marketing course on Udemy – The Complete Digital Marketing Course – 12 Courses in 1 by Rob Percival
William’s Note: I started and returned this course because it’s a basic overview of all digital marketing. I do digital marketing for a living (8+ years of experience), so fundamentally this course is for newbies at best.
I have a round-up of the best digital marketing courses on Udemy, so feel free to check it out if you’re curious on some other digital marketing courses.
With over 150k+ reviews, and nearly 700k students – Rob Percivel’s digital marketing course is the most taken marketing course on Udemy. This course covers a width breadth of topics over it’s 23 hour period with focus on market research, WordPress (no-code), email marketing, copy writing, SEO, YouTube marketing, social media marketing, Facebook ads and much more. The course also dives into things like Quora marketing and social media marketing from Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Pros:
- Great topic coverage, lots of different social media marketing, email marketing and some content courses.
- The course is relatively procedural, it starts out broad with market research and building a website (the fundamentals), then dives into content creation and SEO, then social media marketing platforms (YouTube, Quora, Twitter, Facebook). It then goes to more advanced topics that require an understanding of all concepts aforementioned (Google ads, FB Ads and Google analytics).
- The core focal points for this course are search engine optimization, Google analytics and Facebook ads. Combining these three units is almost half the course.
- The owner Daragh Walsh actually owns a website that he uses as an example for content marketing, SEO and Ads.
Cons:
- Besides maybe Facebook marketing (because it‘s 5+ hours), this course is purely an introduction to digital marketing strategy. There isn’t enough course coverage to make you particularly skilled at any one subject here.
- There’s no actual affiliate marketing? Even though the author said there would be?
- As an SEO expert myself, in reality – there should be a heavy emphasis on backlinks to help grow your website and authority, so you can rank faster and more effectively – this course devotes less than 20 minutes to the subject.
- Google analytics course is out-of-date with GA4 replacing universal analytics in 2023. So it may be pointless to even take that section.
- All of these marketing tools, have secondary tools that make you a more proficient marketer. For example, I use AHrefs, Screamingfrog, Clearscope for SEO and content marketing.
- I expected more training in Google Ads. It’s an essential PPC specialization just like Facebook Ads (which the author spent 5 hours in). There was a very basic walkthrough talk through for Google ads (with no mention of retargeting, or shopping ads, important for eCommerce).
Who is the course for?
- This course is meant for someone without digital marketing skills.
- Someone who’s transitioning to marketing from finance or engineering.
- A person looking to generically learn digital marketing techniques, but not specialize in any one thing.
- A business owner looking to better understand how digital marketing works.
Who is this course not for?
- Someone who’s already in digital marketing. If you know of these concepts, you’re better off Googling how to do things.
- A marketer looking to specialize in a specific category, this is a general marketing course, which is the main target audience.
- A marketer looking to actually run campaigns. While this course shows you basics of many specific categories, you will not be an expert in any of them.
Why is it the best digital marketing course?
Instructor – First and foremost, Rob is a web developer at heart. He runs a code school where he teaches students how to code and grow their skills. He’s branched into a general digital marketing course because you can’t just build products, you also need to market them as well. He has 39 courses, ranging from Python and web development to digital marketing and copywriting. Out of the millions of students Rob has helped coach, his average rating as an instructor for his courses seems to be 4.3 – 4.8 out of 5.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – This course has a 4.5 / 5 rating with 153k+ students.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – A few assignments and quizzes to help cement the general concepts of the course.
Breakdown of the course – Each section (or marketing skill) is broken into a chapter which highlights the major aspects of the specific discipline. For example, in the SEO chapter, Rob goes through things like keyword research and pagespeed at a high level. In my opinion, the chapters could have blended into each other a little bit better. For example, good SEO can help Quora marketing and AdWords and vice versa, but these types of cross channel strategies are barely mentioned. I would have also liked to see more real world examples of marketing strategies.
Updates, Changelog and instructor responsiveness – Very engaged, with the QnA regularly answered.
Hands on learning or tutorial? A full tutorial, where you get just enough that you could have a conversation about the topic, but not enough that you could run your own campaign.
What do students say?
A journey encompassing the entire spectrum from rudimentary knowledge to advanced insights. The course is definitely worth completing.
BTW, I took a hell amount of time to finish it due to personal commitments and engagements. Nonetheless, I wholeheartedly endorse and highly recommend attending the entire program. Kudos to Daragh for making this year valuable for me by offering this educational training program.
Shayan S. – 4.5 / 5 stars – September 2023
Thank You Daragh Walsh and Rob Percival for making 12 in 1 course. It was really interesting journey and i enjoyed each and every lesson taught by you guys. Short videos created by you guys really helped me a lot to understand everything without getting bored. I encourage more people to take your wonderful course.
Ayush S. – 5 / 5 stars – July 2023
Verdict:
If you don’t know digital marketing, feel free to take this course. It’s got a width-breadth of digital marketing knowledge highlighted. However, if you’ve done digital marketing or do it currently, I would skip this course and look at trying to find a Udemy marketing course that can grow a particular skill (IE: AdWords, Facebook marketing or SEO course (like the one below)).
Build your general digital marketing knowledge with Rob Percival!
Best SEO course on Udemy -The Ultimate SEO Training + SEO For WordPress Websites by Joshua George
William’s Note: Another course I looked at and I returned due to my experience in the industry (I’ve been doing SEO for 10 years). That being said, this course is still pretty good from a “full stack SEO” standpoint. I reviewed a number of SEO courses in a previous article.
This 7.5 SEO course is taught by Joshua George, an SEO agency owner based out of the UK. This course claims to have everything you need to understand and do SEO. With a 4.7 rating and over 4.3k+ ratings, it’s one of the most highly rated SEO courses on Udemy. This course covers the following topics:
- Keyword research and general SEO tactics
- How to build high quality backlinks
- How to use internal links to rank for keywords
- Structure of content to capture rich snippets and rank on the first page
- Content ideation
- Technical SEO
- How to measure your success in SEO
- Doing SEO audits
This course at the end will show you free resources you can use and plugins covered in the WordPress environment that Joshua used.
Pros:
- Good keyword research section and mention of some SEO tools (SEMrush, Google autocorrect, Google analytics, Search console)
- The course mentions user experience as a ranking factor (technically the biggest one)
- A good 1.5 hours on how to report on SEO success, I see a lot of tutorials missing this in their course
- LOTS of coverage on link building (by far the most important SEO strategy in my mind)
- Lots of quizzes and a few assignments which is nice
- Cool that they mention negative SEO, most companies don’t do that
Cons:
- No mention of other SEO tools except SEMrush, I would have liked some sort of tiered strategy (Cheap, medium, expensive) since these tools can be costly
- Mentions technical SEO, but only provides a 6 minute video on Schema. Also, doesn’t go over crawl budget and JS loaded content – both important aspects of Technical SEO
- Content refreshing and content strategy is something that’s sorely missing from here. Most publication’s strategies purely rest on this and proper keyword research
- Google Algorithms (Panda, Penguin etc..) don’t mean anything anymore. Google is always testing and doing algorithmic changes, with a general core updating happening mostly once a quarter
- More basic SEO tactics, instead of advanced SEO
- Only covers WordPress SEO, despite it being the most popular CMS in the world – there’s hundreds of other frameworks out there.
Why is it the best SEO course?
Instructor – Joshua stems from providing SEO as a service to companies across the world, which is why the course is so strong fundamentally, he’s done it over the last 6 years. He currently works as an SEO freelancer and owns his own agency in the UK. As an appropriate accolade, his website ranks very well for keywords in the UK like “SEO consultant”, “SEO agency London” and “London SEO expert”. He has over 20 courses published ranging from affiliate marketing to copywriting which all have a 4.6 / 5 rating and higher.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – This course specifically, has 5k reviewers and a 4.7 / 5 rating. While that’s similar or less than some folks that also have SEO courses, it’s a high rating and course content that backs up that review.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – There are quizzes after every chapter and supplementary strategies which make this a great course for someone starting out in SEO.
Breakdown of the course – In my opinion, the course goes through each of the major SEO components by chapter. It focuses on providing the proper pillars of SEO and then provides a quiz / assignment for each of them. Also, the course is only ~8 hours long, so you could do it in a weekend.
Updates, Changelog and instructor responsiveness – Joshua and his team are really responsive and consistently update the content of their course. I think my only concern is the strength of the updates. While Joshua provides “How to measure SEO effectiveness” as a chapter, he uses universal analytics as the example, and not GA4. I would also personally like more real world examples.
Hands on learning or tutorial? – More of a tutorial, but with a little bit of hands-on engagement.
What do students say about this SEO course?
Joshua really holds your hand through the course. Highly recommended for anyone who has no clue about SEO. Joshua really explains clearly how broad this industry really is. I enjoyed the practical tools that he recommended that I can use to boost my website’s SEO. Overall I’m eager to continue applying the growth strategy to see results.
Busi M. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Great! I started working with my husband and his business. He asked me to build his website and learn how SEO works to help improve his company on Google! I’m hoping to use these strategies to build his buisness! Thank you!
Britney M. – 5 / 5 stars – July 2023
Verdict:
This is a great course, with a talented instructor who is growing his business and skills. Joshua and his team are the real deal and will provide you the fundamental knowledge to grow your website. Whether you’re looking for some SEO personal development, or hoping to starting providing SEO as a service – this is a good course to enroll in.
Grow your SEO knowledge with Joshua George
Best PMP / Project management preparation course on Udemy by Joseph Phillips
William’s Note: I completed this course in April 2022, and passed my PMP late 2023, you can read my PMP review here. You can checkout my best Udemy courses for the PMP.
Overview:
An in-depth walkthrough and talk through of all things PMP and PMBOK 6 and 7. Joe provides roughly 30 hours of video with comprehensive analysis of each major process, such as project risk, project schedule, and project scope that you may be tested on the PMP exam. Joe also provides detailed mediums to practice, understand, and become competent in the vast amount of PMP terminologies and methodologies.
Pros:
- Extremely in-depth case studies, which include Earned Value Management (EMV), Input, Tools & Techniques and Output (ITTOs), estimating with float diagrams, and cost management)
- Goes over Agile quite extensively due to the changes in PMBOK7 to PMBOK6
- Compact videos so that you don’t become too bored or overwhelmed by one subject
- Quizzes and two full exams before and after the start of the course
- Thorough explanation on how the PMI sees procurement
Cons:
- Quizzes can have random questions that are not covered in the course material, but can be found in the PMBOK. They also don’t provide appropriate feedback if you’re wrong.
- The connection between units seems to be lacking. While Joe provided ITTOs for every major process, some of the units seemed extremely disjointed.
- Despite having great case studies, some of them tended to be a little over the top. Also, many students called out that some of the exams didn’t have material that covered the questions.
Why is it the best PMP prep course?
Instructor – Joseph Phillips was project manager for a number of traditional and non-traditional capacities which include (tech start-ups, constructions, hospitals, architectural firms and manufacturers. He has over 20 years of experience and has helped publish books in MacMillan McGraw-Hill, Pearson education and AMA. He has over 43 courses on Udemy, many of them with thousands of reviews.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – This PMP course specifically has 85k+ ratings with a 4.6 / 5 star rating. While it may not be the most highly rated (Andrew Ramdayal’s is 4.7 / 5 stars), Joseph’s course has far more students and reviews. Comparing other courses, Joseph has 4x – 5x the amount of reviews that his competitors do, while still maintaining a similar star rating.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – Having gone through this course thoroughly, the course material is solid. It has quizzes after every major chapter and a lot of worksheets / homework, with two practice exams. A great example of this is finding Float in a project. He has a Google slides exercise, with individual questions that really helps drive home the point.
Breakdown of the course – The course starts out with a practice exam to test your skills – then progresses through all of the chapters, which correspond to PMBOK guide units. The inputs, tools and techniques and outputs (ITTOs) are important to know since it’s how all of the PMP concepts relate to each other. At the end of all of the chapters, there’s a practice exam and the course finishes with a few units on Agile methodology (specifically Scrum).
Updates, Changelog and Instructor responsiveness – While updates are somewhat modern, as someone who has read the project management body of knowledge 7 (PMBOK7 (the evolution of PMBOK6, which Joseph based this course on)), I can’t feel like he’s missed the mark and just added a bunch of Agile slides from his PMI-ACP course. A caveat to this is, Joseph and his TA’s are really responsive, and will correct issues that arise within the course material or questions.
Hands on learning or tutorial? This course is a combination of both tutorial and hands-on learning, which makes it a great way to learn project management, even if it’s a new skill.
What do students say?
Great course with all necessary content with very nicely conducted teaching lessons. All that one need to pass the exam and learn about Project Management.
Rushikesh G. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Really thorough PMP Prep course that encompasses in great depth both Predictive and Adaptive (Agile) approaches which are part of the exam. As with anything, you get out of it what you put in, so if you really complete all of the assignments (including the dreaded mapping out of the ITTO’s) you’ll be in good shape towards the exam. Thanks Joseph Phillips!
Oriol T. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Get your 35 PDUs and start your PMP journey now!
Best Excel course on Udemy – Microsoft Excel – Excel from Beginner to Advanced by Kyle Pew
William’s Note: I already had my Excel specialist certification, which really helped me breeze through this course when I finished it in 2021. Looking back on this course, it’s still very high quality with a lot of learnings. I’ve also written a review on the best Excel Udemy courses of all time, check it out!
Overview:
This is an amazing course that will really help you understand the inner facets of working with Excel in 2021. Kyle Pew is a fantastic instructor with a tremendous amount of charisma, skill, and aptitude in all things Office-based. If you’re looking for the perfect, full Udemy course, this is the one for you to get on board with. If you’re looking to just brush up on your Excel pages or content, want to learn the basics of VBA, or have no skills in Excel and are learning from scratch – this is one of the best Udemy courses you can get.
Pros:
- Very comprehensive – goes into great detail for certain functions and tools in Excel
- Great worksheets and exercises, easy to follow, and quite useful in practical sense
- Realistic scenarios and uses for many of the exercises and functions
- Course is regularly updated – I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a 2022 update for the new version of Excel
- Great content length per lesson
Cons:
- This is a VERY long Udemy course. Most courses are between five to 10 hours, and this one is 18.
- The macros section was a tad hard to follow as that content ramped up fairly fast.
- There should be more comprehensive tests and quizzes at the end of each chapter. This would help validate the instructor’s concepts.
Why is it the best Excel course?
Instructor – Firstly, Kyle is a Microsoft certified trainer with over 1 million students trained and hundreds of thousands of reviews. With real world experience from EA, he now works as a trainer for all Microsoft office related products, HTML / CSS, JS, graphic design software like Photoshop, illustrator and InDesign, VBA and SharePoint.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – This is the most comprehensive Excel course you will take. With over a million students, ~330k reviews and a 4.7 / 5 rating. There’s literally no Excel course on Udemy that comes close to Kyle’s course’s notoriety.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – These are amazing, the test data, the sample sets, the quizzes and even the videos are professionally made and high quality.
Breakdown of the course – Fantastic breakdown for someone who knows nothing about Excel, but good as a refresher even if you’re an expert. As stated before, I was already proficient at Excel before taking this course, but then realized I had some gaps in skills like the D functions (dsum, dcount etc..). Also, the ending of the course is perfect, since you move into macros and then VBA.
Updates, Changelog and Instructor responsiveness – This course is regularly updated, with Kyle and or his TA answering questions very promptly. Recently (over the last two years), he added a massive section about VBA which really elevated this course to another level.
Hands on learning or tutorial? It’s a combination of both, but you will leave this course happy and better at Excel, I almost guarantee it.
What do students say?
The way Kyle Pew Sir has taught the course, it was a great experience for me. Sir has taught us the every concept, easy or hard doesn’t matter, with great simplicity and in a fun way. This is the best MS-Excel course.
Hemant J. – 5 / 5 stars – September 2023
This is perfect course for the person who want to learn the excel from beginning (basic) to Advance (Lookups, Pivot, Macros, VBA, etc.), Each & every topic is explained well & understandable. I have repeated the few of video to understand the working excel with Macros, VBA, V&H-Lookups, and making the some of the formula dynamic.
Sujata S. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Verdict:
Take this course if you want to learn Excel. Unless you’re an expert, it doesn’t make sense not to take it, especially if you use Excel on a regulary basis. The only reasons you shouldn’t take this course are:
- You’re trying to get the Microsoft Excel certifications – Kyle’s course is good, but he misses out on a few specifics that will make or break you passing the exams.
- You don’t want to learn Excel.
Kickstart your Excel skills now with Kyle Pew!
Best data science course – The Data Science Course 2022: Complete Data Science Bootcamp by 365 Careers
William’s Note: My experience with data science is limited, and yet I’ve used data analysis regularly through my career and in personal endeavors. That being said, I’ve taken many 365 Careers (the course creator), and they are always top-notch courses. When I’ve grown my Python skills, I will attempt more data science and machine learning courses.
Overview:
This course is an in-depth 30+ hour course which looks at all of the aspects of data science available. You will analyze the theoretical, then dive into probability, statistics, python, regression, mathematics, deep-learning, neural networks, TensorFlow and then a number of case studies which will have you visualization data sets and use tools like Tableau.
Pros:
- A lot to learn in this course, with tons of overviews of multiple machine learning and data science concepts.
- Good cross-over to real world applications like Tensorflow, Tableau and preprocessing tactics.
- Holy mathematics, welcome back college statistics – there’s a fair bit of math in this course
Cons:
- Despite this course being 31 hours, I feel like it could have been longer! There’s individual courses in statistics, mathematics and data science tools that are courses in themselves.
- The Python crash course was a little lightweight. Instead of trying to cramming it into the course, they should have just made it a prerequisite.
- NumPy and MATLAB are such important modules, and yet there were only a few short 30 minute chapters on them.
Why is it the best data science course?
Instructor – Firstly, 365 careers is basically a school which provides course material on business, finance, data science and all related subjects (I’ve taken a business analyst and MySQL course from them which were great). With over 2 million students and ~600k reviews, you know you’re going to get quality presentation and well-thought out material.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – With 4.6 / 5 stars and over 112k reviews, this course does not have better optics than some of the other data science courses on Udemy. Courses like Kirill Eremenko’s Machine Learning + Python R, and Data science or Jose Portilla’s Data Science / Machine Learning bootcamp, have similar ratings (4.6 / 5 stars), but marginally more reviews (30% and 10% respectively). In my opinion, the former tries to pack way too much into one course, and the latter – while it’s good (and I love Jose’s courses), is very old and is missing crucial learning material in late 2022 moving onto 2023. Therefore, comparing these three courses – I will take the one course that focuses solely on Data science, which is 365 careers!
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – Prepare yourself! There are SO MANY questions in this course. There’s assignments, worksheets and workbooks that adds hours and hours onto the total course time. It makes sense, because data science is not a simple concept, but I find myself struggling with time management as I make my way through the course.
Breakdown of the course – This is such a long course, and due to the courses complex concepts, it’s a struggle to get through it. That being said, despite the lack-luster Python bootcamp (they spent 5 minutes on object-oriented programming in Python…), the sequential order of the course made sense.
Updates, Changelog and Instructor responsiveness – Recently updated, with a fairly responsive course staff, this course is pretty good in-way of the updates and course creator engagement.
Hands on learning or tutorial? This course is a combination of both tutorial and hands-on learning.
What do students say?
A great course for starting in Data science, as a suggestion it will be good to put the module of additional Python tools and pandas fundamentals among the first modules.
Juan Diego Mejía V. – 4.5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Excellent course, very complete and with a hands-on approach that makes it even more efficient when learning new topics.
Eduardo Andree P. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Verdict:
If you want something that’s specific to data science, not out of date and has a little bit of Python – this is the course for you.
Begin your Data science career now!
Best AI Course on Udemy – Artificial Intelligence (ARS): Build the Most Powerful AI
William’s notes: Another course about a topic I know less about than data science, Hadelin de Ponteves and Kirill Eremenko bring you a short, but lightweight course on how to build an AI ARS (augmented random search). That being said, I’ve purchased this course to learn more about an AI and struggle through it like so many millions have already!
Overview
This course starts with general overview of two sections, “Intuition” and “Practical”. Intuition is more of a theory and how things work, practical is the usage of Python to build the classes and methods necessary for ARS to function properly. Kirill goes through the Python portion and Hadelin goes through the introductory part.
Pros:
- Kirill Eremenko is a solid engineer, who has many Python, ML and AI courses on Udemy – so you’re in good hands from a engineering standpoint.
- The course is lightweight and easy to finish in a weekend
- Both course creators have a ton of Udemy and AI experience.
Cons:
- Going through this course (as a noob to AI), the intuition part makes sense, but Kirill jumps right into using NumPy and other Python modules + OOP. Therefore, you must know Python to do this course.
- I felt that this course was more of a tutorial than actual hands on learning. There’s zero homework and only “checkpoints” in the course.
- The code is from an older version of Python and 2018, which could cause some discrepancies in your learning.
Why is it the best AI course on Udemy?
Instructor – Both instructors have years of experience in AI and data science. They also have a wide variety of projects and courses on Github and Udemy!
Ratings, Reviews and Students – The course has a great 4.8 / 5 stars and nearly 1000 reviews. That’s small comparably to other courses that teach AI. What sets this course apart from others that I audited or saw is how engaging the course was, versus hours and hours of math and theoretical concepts. Hadelin and Kirill have other AI courses, but they’re not rated as well as this one.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – No assignments, no homework, no quizzes :(.
Breakdown of the course – See the overview above!
Updates, Changelog and Instructor responsiveness – This course is updated regularly with new concepts, but I wonder the validity of these updates. The code is written in Python 3.6 which is fairly out of date (but still usable). The QnA are also answered fairly well, and the instructors seem engaged.
Hands on learning or tutorial? This is 100% a tutorial, a walkthrough talk through.
What do students say?
Good Course
Chia Hsien C. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
This course did exactly what it claimed to do. It taught me to build an AI that successfully did the Cheetah walking simulation, much faster than Google’s first attempt!
Rony S. – 5 / 5 stars – May 2023
Verdict:
Purchase this course if you want some experts to walk you through one specific AI. Do not purchase this course if you expect to master AI. This course is meant to teach ARS and it does that fairly well.
Learn how to build your first AI (ARS) now!
Best Machine Learning course on Udemy – Machine Learning A-Z™: Hands-On Python & R In Data Science by Kirill Eremenko
Overview:
Another Kirill Eremenko and Hadelin de Ponteves course, these enthusiasts look to bring an into the comprehensive machine learning world. While this course says 44 hours, it’s much longer due to the complexity of the chapters. The chapters are:
- Introduction to ML
- Processing of Data in Python + R
- Regression (Simple, Multiple, Polynomial, SVR, Decision Tree, Logic) and how to do regression in R and Python
- Classification (SVM, KVM, Naive Bayes, Decision tree, Random Forest)
- Clustering (K Clustering and Hierarchical Clustering)
- Association Rule Learning.
- Reinforcement Learning
- NLP (NLP in Python and R)
- Deep Learning (Neural Networks and Convolutional Networks)
- Dimensionality Reduction (PCA, LDA)
- Model selection and boosting
Having been updated in 2022 (when this article was first written), you can expect content that’s fairly up-to-date to ML trends in data science.
Pros:
- Over 44 hours of machine learning in R and Python.
- Lots of math which helps with the building of the algorithms
- Tons of in-depth practical vs. theoretical strategies for ML
- 3 hours of Natural language processing
- 6 hours of deep learning
- 5 hours of classification
- Course is modern with updates happening regularly
- You’ll work in Tensorflow (really sought after skill for ML)
Cons:
- This course may be too long, I am struggling to move from chapter to chapter. Only take this if you have the commitment to finish it
- A lot of users complain about the code being “Copy and pasted” which I am experiencing
- There’s 6 hours of math, if you don’t like math – you won’t like this course (and probably shouldn’t be doing ML 🙂 ).
- There are major issues with the code from SVR and onward.
- Due to this course covering so much, the authors end up glazing over concepts which beginners may struggle to know or understand.
Why is it the best ML course on Udemy?
Instructor – Read above in the AI course for their credentials!
Ratings, Reviews and Students – 4.6 / 5 stars, with 161k+ reviews and almost 900k students. No other ML course on Udemy can even come close to this.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – There’s so much material, and each of the topics are skills in themselves. However, there’s no quizzes or homework – which is alright, but could have made the course more immersive.
Breakdown of the course – The breakdown makes sense, but holy hell this is a tough course.
Updates, Changelog and Instructor responsiveness – This course is regularly updated, and has a lot of changes since this technology is pretty recent. Both instructors are very engaging in the QnA.
Hands on learning or tutorial? – This is more of a tutorial for sure!
What do students say?
A lot of great knowledge. I would only sometimes prefer to be more straightforward. I believe, the whole course could take half time without any important knowledge to be lost. Especially, the implementation part.
dolphin consulting A.- 5 / 5 stars – Sept 2023
The course is great. Gives a very decent introduction into all topics of Machine Learning, concepts and intuition are very well explained. Codes provided as templates are good to go. Slides are just amazing. How are they made? 🙂
Victor A. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
Verdict:
This course has me at a crossroads since it’s too advanced for a novice, but not immersive enough for a intermediate or expert in machine learning. While I purchased this course and ran through it from an audit perspective, I found myself returning it because my skills are not ready adequate enough to learn properly. Ultimately, you have lifetime access to this course, so feel free to purchase then go back to it when you’re ready.
Begin your Machine learning journey Now!
Best AWS course on Udemy – Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03
Overview:
This in-depth AWS course was created specifically for passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Certification SAA-C03, which is a very sought after network engineering certification for Amazon web services. Software developers and coders alike look to learn this skill so they can deploy web apps and maintain company cloud servers.
This Udemy course only requires you to have a basic IT knowledge, access to AWS (free tier) and a working computer.
Pros:
- A lot of students say they passed the exam due to this course
- It’s 27 hours of AWS – that’s a lot of knowledge
- It comes with a practice test
Cons:
- While learning AWS console is the purpose of the certification (and displaying the skills), this course is a grind it digs deep into AWS (because you need that to pass the exam).
Why is it the best AWS course?
Instructor – Stephane Maarek is an extremely skilled Udemy instructor with over 1.5 million students and hundreds of thousands of reviews. He’s also the CEO and cofounder of multiple companies that regularly works in AWS. He holds two Masters of Engineering, so he’s not a novice to online learning. He also has the certification, so he’s been through the experience.
Ratings, Reviews and Students – With 4.7 / 5 stars, (143k+ reviewers), there isn’t one comparable course on Udemy. This is the course to take if you want to pass your SAA-C03.
Assignments, Course material, quizzes and homework – One downloadable test, and quizzes in every chapter.
Updates, Changelog and Instructor responsiveness – A beautiful changelog to showcase what updates are done the the course and Stephane is very responsive to students on his courses.
Hands on learning or tutorial? A great mixture of both for this course, since you need the practical skills to pass the exam.
What do students say?
Great! not only was good for me to pass the exam but came out feeling much more knowledgeable.
Kyle N. – 5 / 5 stars – August 2023
I have earned the AWS SAA certification. Great course! It’s will more amazing if you practive on AWS frequently.
Duc Nguyen T. – 4.5 / 5 stars – September 2023
Verdict:
I love these pre-certification Udemy courses. When I read the reviews and audit the course, I see that many people have passed their SAA-C03 (and previous SAA-C02), and it makes me want to take the course and try passing the exam. If you’re looking to pass this exam, feel free to take this course – it seems 100% worth it. I did something similar to pass my PMI-ACP, and am going to do the same thing for Python and also did the same thing when I passed the PMP.
Other courses that are great
Below are some courses that I think are best for the knowledge that they provide, but I haven’t gotten around to auditing them. As this article evolves, I will update and add more and more courses to the queue.
Best Mindfulness course on Udemy – https://www.udemy.com/course/mindfulness-life-coach-training-meditation-teacher-certification/
Best Discipline – https://www.udemy.com/course/how-to-build-self-discipline/
Best Financial Analyst course – https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-financial-analyst-course/
Conclusion
Take this long article for what it is, my current 8 year experience with Udemy and it’s courses. These courses are all my opinion, and as such, open to feedback and changing like the tides of the ocean. If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading and leave a comment or feedback if you think there’s a course I missed, I will add it to the queue ;). While I tried to add some of the more popular programming languages, there are still tons of coding languages like Java, Ruby, C++, C# that I missed and not to mention the network courses and soft skills like singing or coaching.
The most popular free course on Udemy is probably the Introduction To Python Programming by Avinash Jain, which looks at all of the basics of Python. It has almost 62k ratings and over 775k students.
The courses I’ve outlined are some of the most popular Udemy courses. As an aside, technology courses (specifically coding ones and IT), seem to be the most popular on Udemy.