Review of Offline first Mobile apps with HTML5 Link to heading

Something to know about me is that I regularly follow the Humble Bundle bundles, particularly the technology/programming ones.

Some time ago I purchased one of the bundles that came with access to a bunch of Pluralsight courses. The course titled Creating Offline-first Mobile Apps with HTML5 in particular caught my eye and I signed up and started going through the course.

The Good parts Link to heading

The course was good in that You didn’t need to be an experienced JavaScript programmer to pick up the JavaScript code. It was fairly straight forward and easy to follow. Same with the HTML/CSS.

It didn’t try to be too “high level” by using existing libraries or frameworks that abstract how the browser was working under the hood. It explained and gave examples of how the technology works without any abstractions and then once the concepts had been explained, it used simple libraries to hide a lot of the boilerplate functionality (e.g. using Dexie.js for accessing the IndexDB storage).

Things that could be better Link to heading

There were no examples to follow along with. The whole course was a “watch this video” style tutorial, with the application of the concepts and knowledge left up to the reader. In saying that, there was source code provided and it was broken up into sections based on which part of the course the student was up to.

Also, the choice of libraries seems somewhat dated. This is a tough one to put into the “could be better” column, because I don’t have much desire to be a JS developer and I am constantly disapproving of the (in my opinion) overly complicated libraries and frameworks being used these days. I guess I feel like if you were to start on a JS team and you recommended jQuery and Dexie.js you would probably get laughed at.

Conclusion Link to heading

Overall a really good course that teaches the fundamentals well and also gives a practical starting place (and code examples) for anyone to build on. I would not be super confident building my first offline web app after this course, but it does give you a great place to start from.