My Honest Thoughts on "Becoming a Java Full Stack Developer with React & Spring Boot" Course on Udemy

This is a review of this course that I started on October 15 2025 and finished on February 1 2026: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-java-full-stack-developer-with-react-spring-boot/

Requirement before starting this course:

Good fundamentals in JavaScript, HTML, CSS and Java. Although the instructor still explain some basic concepts, he don't explain everything. For example, the instructor won't teach you the concept of inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism and abstraction because he expects you to already know it. Same with JavaScript arrays, objects, and functions. Thankfully, before I started this course, I've already learned JavaScript and Java.

Who I think this course is suitable for:

Beginners that meets the requirements and completely new to the stack, industry practitioners lacking formal training, and individuals who often struggle with confidence in coding.

What I've learned

Knowledge that I gained (even if they were only mentioned once or not in-depth, not in order):

1. Library vs Framework
2. Node.js
3. React JS
4. Vite
5. Babel
6. ESBuild
7. Tailwind CSS
8. JavaScript in JSX
9. Axios library
10. IntelliJ Ultimate
11. React Router library
12. React Hooks
13. Spring vs Spring Boot
14. React Toastify library
15. Font Awesome Icon
16. Best practice in industry vs smaller personal project
17. Sqletron
18. Docker and containers
19. Postman
20. H2 DB
21. MySQL DB
22. Lombok library
23. Java Persistence API (JPA)
24. API versioning naming convention
25. Nodes packages semantic versioning
26. Useful VS Code and IntelliJ plugins
27. Spring Boot Actuator
28. Prometheus metrics and monitoring
29. Global exception handling
30. Automatic API documentation with Spring Doc OpenAPI library
31. CORS, CRF
32. Hashing, Encryption, Encoding Password
33. BCrypt
34. Deploying with AWS Services free-tier (AWS Amplify, Aurora and RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFront)

Complete Project That I have Build

Github repository link: https://github.com/ayaxxchanz/fullstack-react-springboot
Certificate of complettion: https://ude.my/UC-2a2e9c23-2efc-4c74-aa86-8d1ce63bbda8

My Major Takeaway

Take time to understand the concepts in theory. Although some things can be understood better when you start to code, without the instructor summarizing the key concepts and emphasizing the reading of the documentation (even just a little), it would be much harder to grasp.

As someone who used to follow along with YouTube tutorials and ask AI to explain code while I was 'vibe coding,' I now feel that reading the documentation and following even a single lecture from this instructor helps me understand things better than I did over months with just tutorials and AI.

Now, when I look back at my time in the industry, I feel like there are a lot of things I want to change because I now know how to make us more productive, and write secure, readable, and maintainable code with the help of certain libraries.

Final Verdict

I rate this course a 4.5 out of 5 (highly recommend it). For just RM49.90, it's so worth it because the knowledge and the way the instructor explain the concepts feels like they're worth RMxxxx.

Pros

✅ Well-explained lectures
✅ Highly knowledgeable instructor
✅ Fast and responsive replies in the Q&A section
✅ Helpful learning materials (391 slides with graphics and colorful color scheme)
✅ Quite well-maintained GitHub repository
✅ Free 6-month trial of IntelliJ Ultimate
✅ Full English AI-generated closed-caption with 94+-% accuracy
✅ 30-day money back guarantee
✅ Certificate of completion

Cons

❌ No assessment / quiz
❌ Slightly outdated especially with the usage of "React Router DOM" library. Now, it's just "React Router". But it's not too big of an issue
❌ The instructor is more of a Java teacher than a React teacher
❌ Halfway through the course, there was a lot of copying and pasting instead of coding along, even though the pasted code was explained afterwards
❌ Not enough to confidently be a full-stack developer (need more advance and in-depth course for certain topics)
❌ App only has user registration without email verification, no item list pagination, no load different sizes of image based on screen size