I’m flat broke and unemployed. So basically, people are really educated themselves to a level of competency required for software engineering utilizing the free resources here? It sounds too good to be true. But compelling at the say time.
Yes, this is how awesome freecodecamp is. It provides with you all the basics to jumpstart your career. Besides FCC, there are many other good free resources out on the web. If you have desires and a willing mind, you can educate yourself to be a software developer.
If you’re make your way into programming, I don’t recommend using and relying ONLY on FreeCodeCamp.
It’s an awesome resource like stated above, but you really do need to utilize everything you have access to, mainly the internet and the books (I don’t mean overworking). There’s a lot that goes into learning programming the good way and as great as FCC is, it doesn’t give you everything.
That’s for sure I know there’s a variety of different languages it doesn’t cover. It seems to be just the common core fundamentals.
It also doesn’t cover a lot of core computer science fundamentals that will help you think about things as more than just a bunch of text. If you are serious about learning programming take some intro CS classes online like Harvard’s CS50. These will give you strong fundamentals to get you started.
Well, it’s not really the languages as much as the technologies.
Depending on what you want to do, you can use Javascript for pretty much everything web-development related (both client and server side). The technologies are where the diversity and complexity come in, you have many libraries and frameworks that utilize Javascript and that’s where you can specialize and choose different directions.
The “problem” with FCC is that it just doesn’t cover essentials, it doesn’t dive that deep into the concepts and the entire curriculum is based on challenges accompanied by short descriptions, once you complete a challenge you move on to the next one on the list.
I think because of that it’s easy to lose track of what you understand vs think you understand. Also, having these stand-alone challenges you’re completing mostly on your own means you’re missing being exposed to the thought process of a developer during coding.
What I do like very much about its curriculum though, are the algorithms, they’ll challenge you, make you think and give you a lot of ideas how to approach problems in programming, the kinds of problems you’ll often encounter when creating projects. Projects are cool too.
Personally, I haven’t touched FCC aside from its forum for months now, I just benefit a lot more from a different style of teaching so you’ll have to see for yourself if your experience will be similar. I’ll definitely come back to complete all the algorithms (it’s really cool to have so many in one place), but for learning the fundamentals of something I highly recommend just going with video courses.
For example, FCC has a section on CSS Flex and CSS Grid, there is also a guy named WesBos who has 2 free courses on these things. When you get to that point in the curriculum (it’s quite early) you can try doing both and comparing which way you prefer.
Do the algorithms though, they’re cool!