The last few months, my primary learning resource has been the video courses on Codeschool, especially the JavaScript and HTML/CSS paths. These have been excellent, and I would recommend them to anyone. The courses are brilliantly produced and well-thought out, and they give you a strong foundation in web development.
Recently though, I’m starting to see the shortcomings. First, Codeschool courses tend to be intensive rather than extensive. They teach you the fundamentals, but they don’t really give you the tools to go further or to make the jump into independent development. All of the actual coding is done in the Codeschool online environment rather than your own machine, and although the courses are highly focused on teaching you one language / framework, they don’t do much to help you figure out the connections - such as how to take all of these pieces and build a stack.
So I am looking for a new resource. I think video tutorials are an ideal format to learn coding (because you can listen to the explanation while looking at the code), so I’m weighing up three options:
Frontend Masters and Egghead both look like they have excellent content, but I’m leaning towards Pluralsight first because they have the largest library overall and second, because they have various additional learning utilities such as skill evaluations and learning paths. There is also Udemy - some of their courses look fantastic, but you are limited to paying for individual courses. As a learner, I like to jump around like a rabbit on a sugar rush, so I need something more flexible.
So if anyone has any experience and opinions on these platforms, I would love to hear it!
And, yes, I know there is a lot of excellent free materials out there, but I think it is worth paying for a set of well-curated resources.