After Codeschool - Egghead, Frontend Masters or Pluralsight?

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.

That’s the most that any resource can give you, including expensive degrees and bootcamps.

You have the tools. You’ll make the connections out of necessity. You know, the mother of invention?

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Pluralsight also has some front-end masters courses, for example this amazing course. Initially I hated the style but I started liking it since it helps you understand these topics that are a bit confusing.

JavaScript: From Fundamentals to Functional JS
By Bianca Gandolfo
Solidify your knowledge of objects, arrays, and prototypes in JavaScript. Master closures, use higher-order functions/callbacks, and learn underscore.js.

There are too many good courses on pluralsight and with a free microsoft visual dev essentials account you can get 6 months free of pluralsight. Every person on this site should be using pluralsight.

CSS Animation with Transition and Transform by Sandy Ludosky
JavaScript Best Practices by Jonathan Mills
JavaScript Objects and Prototypes by Jim Cooper
Advanced JavaScript by Kyle Simpson
JavaScript: From Fundamentals to Functional JS by Bianca Gandolfo
Practical Design Patterns in JavaScript by Jonathan Mills
How Git Works by Paolo Perrotta
React.js: Getting Started by Samer Buna
Clean Code: Writing Code for Humans by Cory House
Building Applications with React and Flux by Cory House
Building Applications with React and Redux in ES6 by Cory House
Building a JavaScript Development Environment by Cory House

Those are just a few more of the amazing courses I did on pluralsight.

My favourite paid material has always come from Udemy.

Edit; just to add all the courses are on ‘sale’ every other day. They list them at 200 so it looks more enticing when they drop them to 20.

I’d recommend Udacity; you can take courses for free or opt for the paid track ‘nanodegrees’ which offer more support. I’ve taken the courses below without paying and found them to be excellent; well taught, lots of practice, and good fun. There are also many more advanced courses available. Given what excellent learning material and how professionally made many of Udacity’s free courses are, I don’t see myself paying for any course material as such anytime soon, although paying for personal teaching would be a different matter.




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@ac1989 Care to share what courses you’ve used and found good from Udemy? Do you think its a good investment (however cheap) given the number of excellent free offerings at sites such as edX, Coursera, Udacity etc?
I’ve looked at courses on Udemy but always concluded that the free stuff available was so good and so numerous that there was no need to buy.

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Well, I catch your point, but you are overegging it a little. The vanilla JS courses on Codeschool are pretty thorough, and they got me through the FCC front end projects. They do teach some more post-beginner concepts like closures, hoisting and prototypes, and there is a great course on ES6.

When it comes to the frameworks and the backend though, the material is more limited. There is one course on each of the main frameworks (three on Angular - but on different versions), one on node etc. So it gives you a start on everything, but nothing further.

As for taking a “real course” - well, I’m watching through the CS50 videos too, but the early stuff is all pretty basic and I can’t really be faffed to get into C syntax just to do their problem sets. This seems like an unnecessary diversion at the moment.

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Yeah sure.

My starting point was knowing decent React from youtube and my goal was/is fullstack javascript so bear that in mind.

Learn and Understand NodeJS.
Very deep dive into Node. Think it cost me $19.

Advanced React and Redux.
Big fan of this guys stuff personally. Covers a lot of stuff without the pace dragging. Has you writing tests for everything and the real gem for me in this one was the Authentication. Covers authenticating users with Express and tying it up to a React front end. I think it was $15.

(His mongoDB course is good too but not as essential.)

Of course value is going to be subjective. Theoretically you can learn any of this stuff just from documentation but for me, my eyes glaze over. I only have so much time to study so time saved for me is well worth it.

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I feel fairly good answering this, because I’ve used them all.

I’d personally no spend money on CodeSchool, I don’t like their methodology, nor the projects, only spend money on it if you are at a beginner level, but if you’re a bit more experienced, nope.

Pluralsight has good courses, specially in .NET, but that’s it, I’ve spent dozens of hours trying to find useful courses there but they’re all too basic or too complicated.

Egghead is an awesome platform, their courses are top notch and the instructors are awesome, if you’re looking to improve your JavaScript skills, then there is no doubt, from ES6 through React and Redux, to Webpack and GraphQL, Egghead is your best investment.

I really enjoyed Pluralsight and Frontend Masters, and sometimes they have the same videos too. Something to note as well is that a Frontend Masters subscription now includes access to the live workshops that they hold if that’s your thing.

I thought Pluralsight was a fantastic resource for learning. I got a free 6 month trial with my Microsoft Developer account. Here’s a link on how to get it if anyone is interested. They have some really high quality courses on there, although I never really did any of the front-end courses (aside from John Papas Angular course, for those of you who don’t know, John Papa literally wrote the officially endorsed Angular style guide) as I was focused on Java at the time. It’s well worth a look though.

EDIT:
It appears that it’s now a three month subscription that they offer. Still worth checking out!

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Hi @arw2015, i took this course The Complete Web Developer Course 2.0 by Rob Percival , which is awesome! This course teaches you HTML, CSS, jQuery, pure JavaScript, APIs an a lot more by creating projects!

I prefer learning by watching videos like Rob Percival teaches and even better by creating projects, but the only - Cons - i should mention is that is a paid course, but they usually have special discounts like today for $15 out of $200.00.

Will suggest that all campers that like videos tutorial/courses to learn take a look at it!!

With all due respect, Rob Percival’s course is not even the best one for web dev on Udemy. Colt Steele’s web dev bootcamp is much better. I tried both. I bought Rob’s course as my very first online course on web dev but soon realized it’s very inadequate. It covers lots of stuff but only barely scratching the surface on anything and some stuff covered are really questionable given the target audience (beginners). For instance, why teach PHP and python to beginners in the same course?! It’s counter-productive. It doesn’t even cover javascript adequately – nothing about closure, nor “this" or many other fundamental concepts of javascript. Rob’s course doesn’t help lay a good foundation for your web dev knowledge. It’s attractive to beginners because beginners know nothing and naturally get lured in by all those buzzwords like “Twitter”, “Google”, “Wordpress” in the course’s description. Colt’s course on the other hand is about substance – you learn about REST API, NodeJS and ExpressJS so you will be doing LOTS of javascript, which will help you build a solid foundation for your web dev skills. For the better half of the exhaustive course, you’ll be building a respectable web app from start to finish making use of different tools and technologies in the same project, thus developing skills valuable to real world web dev. So it is much more productive than spending hours trying to mimic pixel-perfectly the look of a commercial web site. :wink:

There are some great paths to follow on Udemy (both free and paid courses, and the paid ones frequently go on ‘sale’ to little or no cost.)

But I also HIGHLY recommend YouTube. There are a myriad of great “follow along on your own machine” tutorials for just about any language, platform, or stack. I’m currently going through the content from LearnCode.Academy 's channel, and am learning quite a bit. Can’t wait to try to apply it to some fun and challenging FCC classes.

I hope you find the educational fix that you’re looking for. Happy coding!!

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I think one of the best MOOCs around the web is probably CS50 from HarvardX, it gives you a strong foundation without giving too much away.

I’ve been using Team Treehouse for a while, I think I might be at my 2nd year of subscription to their program but I’ve been unsubscribed for almost a year so that doesn’t count. I love their take on teaching as it is fun and comfortable but if you want to dive into the usage of things, you should probably start building and reading documentations, which are the best and most terrifying parts, I guess.

A lot of websites are also really good for learning advanced to basic stuff, like scotch.io which I use a lot.

Well i respect your opinion on the subject and thanks for the heads-up on Colt Steele’s Course but if have to understand that you have to learn how to learn, the way he teaches to me is great and i learn a lot from it and what i don’t i search the web for it, there is a vast amount of information on the course and i learned a lot from it because of the way Rob teaches the subject and i dont see why he wouldn’t teach php/python when you can pick the language that best fits your needs and i one day might take the Colt’s course but for sure people recommend courses that they have good experience from and i of course would recommend Colts course if i had taken it and see the difference.

I agree. You have to learn how to learn and I think Colt did that pretty well too by stressing regularly throughout his course how to research and find relevant information. I did not feel Rob did that with his web dev course. (Note that I did the 1.0 course, not the 2.0.)

The reason why I think teaching both PHP and Python may be unproductive is that if you are a beginner, it is too much to learn 3 programming languages (Javascript, PHP and Python) in the same course, not counting HTML and CSS. At the beginner’s level, you do not need know that many languages – it just risk hindering your progress and confuse you and you’ll probably forget about one or two of them along the way anyway due to lack of regular practice. Even in computer science or computer engineering programs, you don’t learn that many programming languages in one semester or even in one year. Also, at beginners level, you don’t even know what your needs are or will be and how PHP vs Python matters since you only have a cursory understanding of those languages and you do not have enough experience with real world projects. So three languages is overkill – here the “less is more” moto applies. If you really really need to learn a different language for server-side (instead of sticking with Javascript, which can be used server-side via NodeJS), then it should be PHP; as a beginner, you don’t need two server-side languages.

Advanced React and Redux: I also took this course. All of Stephen Grider’s courses (I took mainly the React related ones) are awesome. If you feel you’re missing the “glue” between technologies I HIGHLY recommend taking Grider’s Node with React: https://www.udemy.com/node-with-react-fullstack-web-development/

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I believe the OP expanded on his point immediately following:

I admit that my gut reaction to his first sentence was similar to yours, but @arw2015’s point is a great one. I am hoping that FCC forces me to play outside these scaffolded environments successfully. I recently bought a domain and hand-coded a slick-looking “coming soon” page in less than 15 minutes without any guidance. I look forward to being able to stand up a web app in a day very soon. I can’t speak to whether FCC will take me to the promised land, but if it doesn’t, I’d love to hear the answers on this thread. I am still confused on how APIs work across languages, but I’m willing to wait and learn.

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I get what you’re saying (16 months later). I didn’t realize that the OP was stuck in preset coding environments. Somehow I thought he was much further along.

I remember being at that point myself, thinking “I know JavaScript! But how do you turn this code into something?”

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