I finished Coursera’s Mobile Cloud Computing with Android Specialization. It’s been a really wonderful experience to get through all the courses and the final capstone.
The Specialization starts with a first approach to all the basic features in Android’s API and from there, the course gets you through all the advanced features -Location Services, Security mechanisms for Intents, Sensors…- with the use of some optimized algorithms curated by the professors to help us learn the best practices for the these vast platform.
It also covers concurrency and design patterns used in multiple areas, not just Android, like ThreadPools and Queues for managing multiple parallel threads and synchronization, the Half Sync-Half Async pattern -used also in BSD Unix-, or Dependency Injection pattern -widely used in web application development- using Spring Framework. With concurrency, there’s a part in one of the courses that covers Networking, using Netty framework -one of the best frameworks in my opinion- for starting a Java web server without using the standard Servlet specs.
Finally, it covers the BackEnd too, with exercises using Spring 4’s framework. This last one has topics like HTTPS, OAuth2, RESTful Web Services -using RetroFit library- and best practices for using WebViews, helping us understand the whole picture when building Cloud Services for Android Applications.
The Capstone project was truly challenging, covering design documentation for Mobile + Cloud projects and deployments using enterprise PaaS products like OpenShift. It kept the focus on today’s industries needs and trending topics for mobile and cloud applications.
Overall, a great Specialization to do, recommendable to everyone willing to start in the Mobile development world and earn a lot of knowledge, with flexible times, and in the timespan of a year.
Special thanks to the professors from Universities of Maryland and Vanderbilt for this great specialization.
Ctrl+P 