What do professional developers think of online programming courses such as Codecademy or...

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Bruno Skvorc

Update: Since this answer was posted, I have become the managing editor of SitePoint's PHP channel, formerly PhpMaster, mentioned in the answer's body below. My daily goal has been making sure that the quality of articles we present exceeds anything previously published there - an emphasis is being put on production-worthy articles in particular, none of those "this is not ready for production" warnings.

The same things we think of Lynda.com, Phpmaster.com, Nettuts etc. Most of those websites are fine - i.e. they're tutorial sites very rarely meant to take you above the basics - but they will never give one the experience of a real project, even if the tutorial is titled "Advanced [something]" or "Expert [something]".

The fact that every single article/tutorial on those websites ends in "Obviously, this isn't production ready, you shouldn't blah blah blah and blah in production, but for brevity..." doesn't really help. If the newbies have nowhere to learn production worthy code from, how would they ever stop being newbies?

That said, all those training sites do serve an excellent purpose in helping newcomers understand the logic and best practices, so I would argue that they are absolutely essential. I myself have both started on such sites and recommended them to newbies - some of whom have gotten scared and gave up, and others who are developers today.

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Michael Bock

★★★★★
In my opinion, Udacity is the best of the "big three" MOOC providers (Udacity, Coursera, edX).

The reason for this comes down to quality of instruction. I've taken classes from all of the above providers, I can say with certainty that the overall quality of the teaching and presentation from Udacity is top notch. Coursera's strength, partnering with universities from around the world, is also its weakness--the quality of the videos is sometimes subpar and the courses sometimes aren't well-organized. Not so with Udacity. Every lecture of every course is close to perfect. Udacity's video editors do an incredible job of making very high quality videos with few mistakes. In addition, I have found that Udacity's model for video lectures is the easiest to learn from. Udacity uses some very cool technology to shoot the lecturer's hand while he/she is writing on a large tablet and can also overlay a computer screen. This model beats videoing a professor in a lecture hall or the teacher merely talking over powerpoint slides.

Overall, while Udacity has fewer courses than Coursera (or even iTunesU), the quality of each course is great and very consistent. Udacity has really chosen some incredible teachers, for example Peter Norvig and Steve Huffman of Reddit (website) and Hipmunk, and their effort has manifested itself in some wonderful online learning material.

[Disclaimer: As of May 2014, I work as a Software Engineering Intern at Udacity, but at the time of writing this review (March 2013) I had no affiliation with Udacity aside from taking classes.]

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Austin Keeley

I've done a few courses on Codecademy and two coures on CodeSchool. I've had good experiences with both of them for doing refreshers on JavaScript and getting a gentle intro to Ruby. Usually it's more engaging than reading a book and copying exercises by hand.

Moving outside of the learning environment feels different though and has many unseen challenges. For example, CodeSchool's Rails for Zombies class was easy and made me think I was a rails expert. That was before I tried to deploy my Rails app to a server and had to learn all the subtle details of how Rails actually works. One of the selling points of CodeSchool is that you don't have to do any setup on your local machine, but I feel like a major part of learning these languages isn't just writing the code but also working within an environment.

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Song Zheng

90% of the people who use Codecademy and Codeschool to try to learn coding fail. This is because 90% of people who turn to Codecademy and Codeschool are learning programming for the sake of learning how to code. This is why you will not be hired if you list Codecademy and/or CodeSchool badges on your resume.

The other 10% of people who use Codecademy or Codeschool become successful developers because they are learning programming to build a tictactoe game to play with their friends; a ecommerce site so they can sell things; a video chat app to connect with relatives; etc.

There is a very different mentality between the 90% and the 10% who are learning programming, and the successful ones are those who sees learning platforms as means to an end, not the end itself. For example, if you have no programming experience and want to learn how to code, your goal should not be claiming all the badges on Codecademy. Your goal should be building a simple game (or website) and you should learn just enough on Codecademy/Codeschool to build that app.

As you move along, you will set bigger and more complex goals for yourself and build more engaging apps. These will became the apps that you will proudly put on your resume, and the story of your wonderful journey will have given you the experience you need for a programming job.

... or perhaps one of your apps might one day inspire hundreds of talented individuals to work under you.

edit: A great example is Jennifer Dewalt, who learned programming by building 180 Websites in 180 days.


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Tal Raviv

Interesting question.

Even before the advent of online tech education websites, software has always been a field that measures people nearly entirely by accomplishments (as opposed to credentials). This goes even for computer science degrees, which many poor software developers have and many great software developers don't.

If I was looking at your résumé I wouldn't care how you learned to code, I would be more interested in what you've done with that knowledge.

This could mean personal projects, contributions to open source, blog posts about cool things you've tried or discovered. Client work you've done of you have any.

Those are your real qualifications and what would get me excited to talk to you.

In fact, when you build enough cool stuff that you're willing to share with the world your initial time on tutorial websites won't even register in your mind as relevant. You probably have started to feel this already.

This goes for employers too. Putting how you learned up on your résumé would detract from my impression of you because it means that you see it as significant enough to mention. I'm interested in someone who has practically done enough with that knowledge that what they learned by doing drowns out the introductory courses.

Hope this helps. Keep building stuff! Prove the power of what you learned and that the way you learned doesn't matter.

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