A few weeks ago I blogged about an online course dedicated to Chrome's DevTools. That was my first experience with Code School and I thought it worked very well.
This weekend I decided to try their Backbone course. I've been learning Backbone over the past month and as I had a free pass, I thought I'd check it out. The course is very well designed. Each video is approximately 7 or so minutes long, a perfect chunk of content to digest. I've completed the first Backbone course and am mostly through the second, and only once or twice did I need to pause the video so I could mentally "catch up" with the material. Each video is a professional affair. This isn't some guy with a web cam (like most of my videos).
I was fascinated by the challenges in the DevTools presentation and was happy to see they worked well in the Backbone course as well. To be clear, these challenges aren't asking you to type exactly a precise line of code. No, if they ask you to do X, then you can (for the most part) write it exactly as you like. I really dig this. Here's a simple example. Imagine you were asked to write a function that added two numbers and returned the result. You could write it like this:
Or like so:
Most of us would probably prefer the latter. It is more concise and simple. But if you are new to JavaScript, you may be more comfortable with the former. I know when I was learning jQuery, I found many of the examples a bit too hard to parse as they were long lines of things chained together. I intentionally broke those examples up so I could follow the logic better.
So as I said - Code School's challenges allow you to write your code as you see fit and not worry about precisely matching some unseen expectation. I love it. Sometimes it doesn't work well. I got some very odd errors a few times. But I never got stuck.
Code School costs 25 dollars a month to enroll. Just the one course I took was worth ten times that. Your enrollment covers all of their courses. You can also download the videos and slides so you'll have access to the material later.
Want to try it out? This link (for the next 48 hours) will give you a free two day pass (and extend my free trial too :) - http://go.codeschool.com/IyebUA.
Archived Comments
I love it. I grabbed the hall pass from your link on twitter and have been enjoying what they have to offer and how it's taught all weekend ;)
I started having a quick look at this when you mentioned it the other day, and it does look good. So I've added it to the list of stuff "I really need to look at before too long". A lot of their stuff looks really interesting.
Cheers for the heads-up, Ray
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Adam
Maybe you can finally learn some front end stuff. ;)
Chuckle. *Maybe*. Ah, it all sounds interesting, I don't dispute that. It's just prioritising it with other things.
Glad to see you're still blogging after passing away earlier today, btw. That is true dedication.
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Adam
Heh, for folks curious, this is what showed up in my GMail today:
http://www.thetelegraph.com...
As just an FYI, I officially finished lesson 2, and my opinion remains the same - incredible course.
I love CodeSchool, man, and I try evangelize them to my colleagues in higher ed. My intro--following Jeffrey Way's 30 Days to Learn jQuery--was their JS/jQuery Air/jQuery Air: Captain's Log a little more than a year ago when I was really trying to polish - and by the end I was like, "shit, I've had *fun*."
My only beef is that they're really rails-centric and I just frankly don't get a lot of professional opportunities to work with rails. Big fan though.
I looked at Ruby about a year or so ago (not Rails, just Ruby), and it seemed interesting. It just didn't get me excited.
First, thanks for sharing the link to CodeSchool - always been interested in Rails but never knew where to get started. I'm already sending the link to the Hall Pass to every nerd I know.
Second - Ray, you will be missed. RIP ;-)
Raymond,
This is an awesome blog post! Thank you for mentioning Code School :)
If your hall passed expire and want to try codeschool for a month trial at 9 dollars which regularly cost 25 dollars you can get the offer from there: http://webuilddesign.com/en...