Pluralsight Video Review - A Beginners Guide to the Microsoft Platform

A Beginner’s Guide to the Microsoft Platform by Michael Palermo (1hr 48m)

My first review of the courses and I think it is worth beginning by saying that I suppose all reviews depend largely on where a person is coming from, what they already know and what they hope to gain from something. Not everyone likes vanilla ice-cream and that’s OK.

I also feel it’s worth mentioning just how much work and effort must go into these videos and clearly, what depth of skill and knowledge the authors have. Reading this back to myself, it really must sound like I am about to deal a death-blow :-) I’m not, but I suppose it is playing on my mind a little - I don’t want nor like to be negative.

OK, so let’s begin with what I liked about this course. I really liked the fact that you got to see a glimpse into the main offerings of ASP.NET and the web framework. Michael only touches upon things because it is quite short, but he often gives you a good flavour of the technology. He also keeps to a structure in that each module involves creating a page, allows input and uses data. That helps you to pin everything together and begin to make some comparisons.

As it was my first, I didn’t think to try and follow along with the code but I wish I had because that would have made some of the ideas more concrete. He does move at a fair pace though, so this should be borne in mind. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel that these represented several videos that had been bolted together. By that, I mean he kept repeating how to open and close solutions in Visual Studio. They weren’t word-for-word exactly the same, but incredibly similar. My guess is that these were stand-alone videos explaining topics that he thought would fit together well. I believe they could - but with a little editing.

Overall, as a quick introduction, it’s quite good, he is easy to understand and he knows his ‘stuff’!


Hi! Did you find this useful or interesting? I have an email list coming soon, but in the meantime, if you ready anything you fancy chatting about, I would love to hear from you. You can contact me here or at stephen ‘at’ logicalmoon.com