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Kevin.Richards

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 20, 2016
60
6
Hi,

Has anyone studied paid courses from Udacity? They have these nanodegree programs for Front-End and Full-stack project based paid courses for like $200 per month. What is your opinion? I want to start with front-end then move to full-stack. Is it good to start such way?
 
Hi,

Has anyone studied paid courses from Udacity? They have these nanodegree programs for Front-End and Full-stack project based paid courses for like $200 per month. What is your opinion? I want to start with front-end then move to full-stack. Is it good to start such way?
I'd go for youtube first, there are plenty of free resources and tutorials. I've bought individual courses here and there, but found that it really depends on the tutor, the pace and the projects, if something really clicks. I'd exhaust the free stuff first and build stuff on your own based on that knowledge than take the plunge and maybe end up disappointed with the material.

Look up: devtips, net ninja, leveluptuts on youtube, those have plenty of content to get you started.
 
I recently 'won' a Google Scholarship with Udacity. Essentially you got to do the first part of one of their pad courses for free along with 20,000 other people, with the top 2,000 going through to complete the whole thing. I didn't complete it, gave up after a few days in fact. It wasn't hard, by a long stretch. It was just incredibly basic and therefore boring.

I echo the above. Start with YouTube, plus there are tonnes of free resources out there for learning to code too.
 
I bought a class for my 10 year old son at Udacity and it was a reasonable introduction to the topic -- if you already had a reasonable understanding of the topic. My problem with MOST of the inexpensive online training is that they make far too many assumptions and unreasonable statements about the target audience of the classes. In many cases, I have found that it would be impossible for most of the target audience to even set up the development environment correctly, let alone actually complete the class. In addition, the classes that I have experienced have mostly not taught anything to a reasonable level of understanding. Instead, they often have the recipe of: copy this code, paste it here, wow, look what you just did -- your an app developer!

I guess the problem that I have with cheap online classes is their overstatement of class goals and outcomes. No matter what a class promises to you, you cannot take a single class (or ten) in front-end web development and know anything about modern web development. What you CAN do, is take one of these classes with the understanding that your will need to spend dozens of hours doing additional research and experimentation each time a new concept is introduced during the class. It's up to you to put in the time to truly understand the concepts that are introduced in an extremely shallow nature in these classes.
 
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