Code School free weekend! (November 17-19, 2017)

Just got an e-mail straight from Code School, they’re having another free weekend this coming weekend, November 17-19 starting on Friday 11/17 at 10 AM EST! Anyone who hasn’t used the platform yet should do either their HTML/CSS path or their JavaScript path, which are both really good and cover a wide range of topics:


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Good Information! Thank you @astv99.
Question: Do you know those topics only weekends free? What will happen if not finished in the weekend? Can we take both topics or not?

Thank You

Everything on Code School will be free over the weekend, not just those links I posted. Code School has lots of courses covering tons of different subjects: https://www.codeschool.com/courses

If you don’t finish a particular course during the free weekend, the website will simply lock you out from further progression in that course and won’t allow you to finish it. You’ll need to pay for a subscription in order to finish a course that you’ve started, after the free weekend is over. But most courses are relatively short, and it’s possible to finish one course in a few hours.

You should take as many courses as you can over the free weekend. Those two links that I posted above only list all of the courses in HTML/CSS and JavaScript. You probably won’t be able to finish both the HTML/CSS and JavaScript paths in a single weekend, well unless you have all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday free and don’t have to do anything else. :wink:

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It is truly free (I did it last year), and if you can’t finish a course, you can download the lectures. I downloaded about 20G of courses last year. I don’t think the quality of courses on codeschool is that great, but you can’t go wrong for free.

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Thank you for your good explanation. :+1:

@IsaacAbrahamson Great Idea! Thank You.

@IsaacAbrahamson Hmm… By quality, do you mean they don’t demonstrate up-to-date best practices? Or, do you mean video and writing quality or some other non-coding related quality?

I ask because if they’re not demonstrating best practices, then it is possible to “go wrong for free.” :slight_smile:

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I wouldn’t say they aren’t using best practices. I think you can learn the basics with CodeSchool very well. The problem with CodeSchool isn’t that the video or writing quality is bad, they just don’t cover in-depth. They focus most of their attention on building songs and fancy videos, and while the content they do have is good, it is very basic. Learning to ride a bike is good, but CodeSchool never takes the training wheels off. Topics don’t cover more intermediate and advanced skills. You won’t be doing a lot of work building actual projects like you would on freeCodeCamp, because everything you do is on their own challenges. The courses also don’t give you much to go when you finish. You have a good idea of the subject and know the basics, but it is hard to relate it with other skills and put it to practical use. This is what I mean by the quality isn’t that great. Yes, the video quality and songs are catchy, the things they teach are good, but the courses are more for the beginner or casual learner than a serious developer.

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@camper, here is another post that might explain it better.

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@IsaacAbrahamson Thank you! Your response plus that link give great context for this free weekend. :sunny:

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I agree with @IsaacAbrahamson - CodeSchool has some good info, but I never cared for the presentation. The one exception that comes to mind is JavaScript - Best Practices, which is a stellar course. If you take notes and study the material, you will write better JavaScript. The jQuery courses had some stuff that I don’t usually see in other video lectures, but nothing world-changing.

Code School courses are cute and entertaining. I don’t think they explain stuff as well as a course from say, edX or Coursera, and they certainly don’t show you how to do anything in your own editor or browser. I do participate, though, just for kicks and their jingles are pretty catchy.

I definitely agree with the majority of your post there, but that part in bold might be a bit misleading for those who are actually beginners and casual learners. Code School is a great platform for quickly gaining a basic knowledge of something (whether it’s Angular, React, ES2015, etc), but I’d dissent that their courses are for beginners and casual learners when they don’t have any courses on basic programming principles and their courses often dive into the code right away, with no explanation on topics like environment & tools setup. For that reason, I’d say their courses are more geared towards intermediate-level developers, or at least those who are already familiar with not only general programming concepts but also at least one class-based object-oriented language (C++, Java, Python, Ruby, etc—but not JavaScript of course).

I personally find Code School’s gamification-based approach a bit annoying as well, but to their credit, their courses do a really effective job at showing the basics, as you mentioned. Probably the best thing about their courses is how good they are at explaining the “big picture” for important concepts and how things fit together, and in that sense they make for great intro-level courses to a new language, framework, library, or tool.

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