remarks about ST quality of education

[gdori.1]

Hello,

My goal is to evaluate several ARM Cortex-M4F chip manufactures and select the one that best fits my needs for building IoT devices. I will admit that I am on the learning curve and that I’m doing this on my spare time. 

I’ve read a lot of books on programming, and I’ve found that the best ones are written by teachers. Because a book written by a teacher – reads like teachers teach. A teacher will start with something that the student knows and build gradually step by step. A book written by a programmer reads with the same level of difficulty throughout. 

I, for one, find ST’s educational text and videos hard to follow. I find ST documentation to be more of a reference level and not very applicable for learning. As for videos – my primary complaints are what I just mentioned, but also that the presenters have strong non-English accents, and this makes it a struggle for me to follow along. In one example, one presenter tries to say “starts�? but it sounds like he is saying “farts�?! I understand that ST is a European based company, but if a company is doing business in other countries then the presenters should be fluent in that language. 

I would suggest that ST refer to TI and Mindshare Advantage LLC also books on programming written by Stephen Prata. As for me – I think I will move on to another chip manufacture. 

George 

[S.Ma]

Start from your needs to narrow down the candidates, maybe by looking at suggested embedded platform from cloud vendors. Then narrow down the search. After this it depends on your ultimate goal and constrains, which platform is popular and is backed with community for support? Well each country will have people with different typed english accents, it is a good working skill to be able to interact with all especially with remote team coders from different locations. Agreed that the ideal english is the one that anyone in the world can understand and few can achieve it.

[JPeac.1]

First, a reference manual is just that, a reference for a designer to look up register specifics. It isn't a beginner's tutorial.

ST and other vendors are in the education market primarily to bring professional engineers up to speed on new products, not replace schools. They are a business, and their customer base is the engineer who designs boards for 100K units/year, not students with hobby boards. If you want to complain, focus on the schools who turn out functional illiterates for the task of embedded engineering. Or individuals who think coding a website qualifies them to build a controller from scratch.

Could ST do better? Of course, but given a fixed budget I'd rather see the bulk of that resource go into new product development (and a more professional approach to their helpful software). I don't see that ST is any worse than other major players like NXP/Freescale or Microchip/Atmel when it come to educational material.

Jack Peacock

[Tesla DeLorean]

Frequently the people in the actual "teaching" role know barely more than the students/class they've been assigned that semester.​

[Pavel A.]

... because a good way to learn something is to try and teach others ))

[TDK]

In addition to JPeac.1's excellent comments, everyone learns differently. It's on you to figure that out.

I hate watching videos to learn coding. It's usually about 5-10 minutes of talking and watching someone click a mouse for information that could have been captured in 1-2 sentences. Examples are way better to learn from, and there's tons of those for STM32. If you're trying to learn basic C or C++ at the same time as learning the STM32 platform, it's going to be an uphill battle. People go to school for years to do that. But it can be done.

ST's primary goal is delivering hardware. Providing software and learning resources is secondary. Selling a a few $10 chips to hobbyists isn't a viable business model. My opinions.