Course Review – Udemy’s Electron for Desktop Apps: The Complete Developer’s Guide

​Recently I completed Stephen Grider’s Udemy course Electron for Desktop Apps: The Complete Developer’s Guide. My purpose for taking this course was to better understand Electron to determine if it would be a solid framework to build some fun tool. This blog is a short summary of my thoughts and how the course turned out.

Initially, I chose this course because the price point was great(about ten bucks), the course had great reviews(4.5 stars and a total of 2,823), the number of students was substantial(17,070), and the course was recently updated.

If you look up the author Stephen Grider, you will see that every other course on Udemy is equally well received.  And for a good reason. Stephen is a fantastic speaker and an instructor who puts serious thought into the flow of his material. He started with an easy example to get the class started and introduce Electron. Then worked his way up to a reasonably complex video conversion project. Along the way, sprinkling new concepts and explaining his design choices.

I especially enjoyed his refactoring asides. The refactoring helped me get into the mindset of a developer and better understand when to modify code. Honestly, I am a complete newb at coding, but I try. I have a few things I have hodgepodged together, and I can script well. But, serious applications still elude my abilities at the moment. Learning from people that develop for a living has slowly increased my skills and organization of code. So these lessons were much appreciated.

The areas he covered undoubtedly gave me an excellent base to work from. Still, I wouldn’t say this is a complete guide by any stretch of the imagination. I am sure the title gives him great SEO, though. I can appreciate that as a blogger.

Regardless, you will learn how to connect other frameworks such as React with Electron and grasp the overall capabilities.

With that being said, I only have two gripes, and that is he wrote his code on an Apple. This doesn’t sound bad, but it actually caused a slight headache during the course. He did try in the first project to account for the differences, but they continued to pop up during the course.

Additionally, “fluent-ffmpeg,” one of the libraries, caused some issues. Due to the age and vulnerabilities, I didn’t want to install it on my PC. I know my choice. I could have used a VM, but honestly, I have had so many issues using a VM with VisualCode that I didn’t want to deal with it. This forced me to sit out most of the last project and just watch. The import didn’t work right, and I got undefined when I attempted to get metadata with the library.
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Besides those issues, I am definitely a fan of Stephen and Electron. If I had to rate it, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars. I look forward to writing some Electron tools in the future and checking out his other courses if the opportunity arises.