Do these Udemy courses teach professional-level skills or are they scraping the surface?

I know that most of these courses aim towards beginners and promise good outcomes, but are they really teaching professional-level skills or are they just touching on the basics/fundementals?

Pretty much what I am asking is, do these courses provide a solid foundation or do they just barely scratch the surface?

It varies.
All I can suggest is that you take one, when at the sale price, and find out for yourself. There are already some threads on here about Udemy.

If you’re referring to coding “best practices” and actual demonstration of skill by the instructors, some of the instructors on Udemy are certainly better than others. I’ve completed (or partially done) about 20 courses so far by different instructors, and even out of that tiny sample size, have found that in general, the not-so-good instructors vastly outnumber the better ones—and some of these not-so-good instructors have pretty bad holes in their knowledge too!

This is mostly because Udemy does absolutely no “vetting” of the instructors who offer courses on the platform—they’ll host a course by anyone who uploads one, whether that person actually knows the topic or not, or is a qualified instructor or not (and remember: just because someone is a good developer doesn’t automatically mean they’re also a good instructor—I’ve run into some “instructors” on Udemy that I’m sure are good developers but can’t teach to save their lives!). This point cannot be repeated enough, and is the major contributing reason why course quality varies so much on Udemy.

If your question is more of wanting to know if completing certain courses on Udemy are good enough to learn pro-level skills, I’d say this is definitely not the case. Even the best courses that I’d recommend on Udemy often don’t showcase skills that you need to learn as either a front-end or back-end (or full-stack) developer. So yes, even doing the top few courses that I’d recommend on Udemy is still just absolutely scratching the surface.

For example, 3 of the top courses that I’d recommend on Udemy are Colt Steele’s “The Web Developer Bootcamp”, Brad Schiff’s “Git a Web Developer Job”, and Andrew Mead’s “Complete React Developer Course”. They’re all great courses and absolutely worth doing, but completing those 3 is still just the beginning towards getting into web development, whether that’s front-end or back-end. They’re only a start to a solid foundation. You need to keep going and learning as much as you can about a ton of different things.

Taking a look at this will reveal a lot of the topics that you should learn: https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

Furthermore, you should absolutely not be limiting yourself to Udemy’s platform to comprehensively learn web development via online courses. Putting aside other resources like Google and StackOverflow (which are also essential), and books (whether ebooks or in print), there are definitely better platforms for learning web development:

  • Lynda / LinkedIn Learning
  • Pluralsight
  • SitePoint Premium
  • Frontend Masters
  • Linux Academy
  • MongoDB University (free!)

For the topic of learning HTML5 specifically, you won’t be able to beat Lynda. I haven’t found a better platform than Lynda for learning HTML5 in particular—none of the other platforms have anywhere close to the coverage on HTML5 that Lynda does. It’s worth taking advantage of Lynda’s free 1-month trial to do all of the HTML5 courses by James Williamson, he really knows his stuff and is probably the most qualified individual to teach the topic!

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I echo the sentiments above about not limiting yourself to one source of information. My personal experience is that different instructors deliver information in different ways, and it is that different point of view in approaching a topic that provides further insight into what you know and what more you need to know .

I was learning about git from scratch about a week ago and totally confused - I really did not fully understand what this ‘git’ was all about.

I watched three different beginner tutorials on Lynda from three different instructors. Each of them had a different approach to explaining the same things. Some used diagrams, others used examples with terminal commands only, others spoke a lot. I then went onto Udacity and found another course there - also a different approach. By the end of the day I had a much better understanding not only of how git worked, but also what the topic scope of ‘git’ actually was, and what I still needed to learn to be proficient. Once you know what you need to know - you’ll know where to go and find those learning resources.

Again, as above, Udemy has great instructors and not so good. My local public library gives its members free access to Lynda (now LinkedIn Learning) - maybe your local library has something like that?
Lynda/LinkedIn vet their instructors and have clear paths from beginner to to advanced levels. Pluralsight also vets their course content and it’s very good - but you have to pay for it.
Udacity has paid nano degrees, but you can audit most of their courses for free.
EdX and Coursera allows you to audit their courses for free, and they are all from Universities and large tech companies like Microsoft.

@Hjb1694 Udemy is good if you want to learn a particular subject, such as Flask, Nodejs, Javascript, or How to play chess. Some courses are advanced, the free courses not so much. A lot of them do teach professional level skills and the prices are pretty good. I would say that most courses teach at professional level. The only courses that scratch the surface are the shorter ones that are around 5 hours or less.