I took Steve's course on Udacity, my first time doing any sort of substantial web development. A few weeks later I met him at a YC event, used the Udacity course as an icebreaker and now hes my boss at Hipmunk.<p>True story.
GAE is really the perfect "my first web app" platform. It just works right out of the box. No need to setup your environment or dependencies to get a web app running locally, and then it's equally trivial to host it on the internet.<p>After learning the basics of web development using GAE, I've since moved on to other platforms like RoR and NodeJS. But GAE still holds a special place in my heart.
Steve has been a mentor and speaker at Dev Bootcamp (<a href="http://devbootcamp.com" rel="nofollow">http://devbootcamp.com</a>) for our last two cohorts and he's fantastic. Our students love him and he's a kind, patient teacher.<p>Many of our students tell us Steve's udacity course was their first run-in with web development.
I took the Web Development course at Udacity too. It was probably more work than some were expecting (especially for a 2xx-level course), but Steve's knowledge and enthusiasm made for a great, challenging course.
Heh. It took me <i>a lot</i> longer than Steve here to set up App Engine on my current computer, and setting up XAMPP on my last computer to run a local server took a fraction of the effort. I don't use an IDE, either; I use Notepad++ for ALL my coding, so that's another trouble I don't have in any case.<p>GAE may allow you to set up a server visible to the entire Internet, but I think my fonder memories will be reserved for other tools.
This is awesome. I didn't enroll in the class but I love the fact that it's available for me as a reference.<p>What I specifically liked is the fact that they introduced and discussed concepts that I won't necessarily deal with unless I happen to be working on a high traffic app or site, which at this stage of my life (Senior student living in a developing country) is unlikely to happen. Thank you Udacity.
Steve's course is a great starting point for web development. It helped me build <a href="http://votersentiment.appspot.com" rel="nofollow">http://votersentiment.appspot.com</a> :)
I took this course, and it was easily the best programming course I've taken. Very well thought out and well balanced, plus everything is better on the Udacity platform.