I recently have been furloughed from work , I applied for a scholarship to codecademy pro. They were gracious enough to accept and gave me 3 months free. First of all, that's great that they did that , take everything i'm about to say with a grain of salt.

First a bit about my situation, which you may not care about, but might find yourself in a similar situation.

Long story short, i'm feeling a bit vulnerable after many recent layoffs and wanted a secondary skill that I could either make a side hustle of, or find employment should things take a turn south.

I dabbled in a few languages and felt web dev was the best course for me.

I wanted to learn HTML and CSS as a foundation for web dev.

Codecademy is VERY NICE

I'll cut to the chase. After 5 weeks of this program i felt great. The website makes you feel like you are ready to hit the ground running and you're a goddamn pro. The problem is , you're not. They toss you into these "projects" towards the middle of the curriculum and want you to build clones of some pretty code heavy websites. The problem is you just don't have the knowledge to tackle them.

After a short 15 slide lesson they will say " ok , now you know flexbox " .... although you might be FAMILIAR with flexbox ... you do not KNOW it. It has alot of mobile gameish features like login streaks to really hit those dopamine receptors and make you feel like you're the king shit. But you just aren't.

I've gone back to project odin and it's been a very humbling experience. It doesn't make you feel great about yourself or pat you on the back and tell you what an expert you now are. But it is EFFECTIVE. I feel like I got knocked down a few pegs, but I also feel more confident as a DEVELOPER.

If you are looking for a path to become a good web dev. I would steer clear of codecademy. I am really grateful for what they have put together but it just lures you into a false sense of worth. Dont waste the time on it like I did when there are great free alternatives like project odin.

Hey,

I just wanted to let everyone considering buying CodeAcademy Pro that it's terrible. I'm currently learning Swift and their compiler is just awful. When I click on "Run" nothing happens or sometimes it gives me an error, because I don't have spaces exactly at where they demand the spaces to be. I code in Xcode and my code works and it gives me no error, when I copy the same code onto CodeAcademy it gives me bunch of errors.

The certificate might be the only "useful" thing I might get out of it, but that's about it and I'm not sure if any of the employers care about CodeAcademy's certificate at all. Maybe only very few of them.

Also, once I googled for a solution, because I didn't know what to do and I found the exact same tutorial on Apple Developer page for free. I'm just pretty disappointed with CodeAcademy. It seemed to work fine when I tried it for free.

As per title, and I mean both financially and educationally.

I'm brand new to programming, I've started the Free Python course they offer, but I need more grounding in Computer Science and Programming in general I think to make it work for me.

CodeAcademy offer pathways to do this - has anyone had any experience here, and is it good for a beginner?

Thanks

EDIT: Thank you to everyone that replied - you've given me a decent amount to think about, and some other useful resources. Your help is appreciated :)

Hey everybody. Facing recently the world of programming and really want to go in deep into it.

First things first, I'm a biologist, so I would apply those knowledge in the bioinformatic field, so no deep scripting, machine learning and so on.

I'm wondering if the pro account of CodeAcademy is really worth its money to acquire a basic knowledge of the most important languages (i.e. python, R, bash, etc.) That would allow me to start a possible career in bioinfo.

I know that the website release also some certificates of completion that, for what I know, are accepted as CV in the field. Any experience with that?

Thanks to all that will answer :)

I couldn't resist their half price offer, which brought it into my "give it a go what do I have to lose!" budget. I don't have any great plans, at 51 I just want to see what I can learn. So far so good, I followed the first few exercises and although at first I didn't have a clue what was going on, after an hour I had managed to do a few things and was even playing around trying to mix up what I'd learned a bit. I did write programs in Basic on a Z X Spectrum when I was at school, I wrote a program that tested my French vocabulary and also have done websites and fiddled with Javascript and HTML so I guess I'm not starting totally from scratch - though of course the difference between a Z X Spectrum and today's computing power is orders of magnitude different!

I've no idea how this goes from these very simple things to making something like an app/program that actually does something useful, but it looks like it will be interesting to learn, I'm sure I'll be seeing code as I go to sleep over the holidays, event though I should be taking a break (mind you it's so different from my day job that it feels like it could actually be very relaxing and distracting!)

There have been a few people encouraging me on here over the last few months so I thought I'd stop by to say I've finally taken the plunge and got started with my first steps 😀

I've been using Codecademy quite a bit lately. I don't have the funds to dive into the full year plan. So I was thinking about checking out a month of pro (because I know I won't learn much about it in 7 days). The extra quizzes and even projects seem like they would be a nice addition to what I'm doing already.

So far I've been spending about 5 days a week and one and half to two hours each day going through lessons and exercises. I haven't started working on any small projects yet, but I have been typing up code to see what I can do with what I know right now.

I've also been going through a c# for dummies book.

I'm a sophomore majoring in Computer Science. Right now I'm taking the semester off, but still want to work on my programming skills and learn how to make something I can put on my resume. Codecademy Pro looks like it has some interesting courses where I can learn how to make something like that. Is it worth the money?

I can afford many udemy courses and can afford codecademy pro.

So there's this pretty well-known and renowned website called Codecademy. I'm currently taking their free Java course and I don't find it to be that great. It's pretty hard to understand and the course isn't structured that well in my opinion(though I have very slight experience with Java). I'm thinking of switching to a different source but I want to know if it's just me or if it's the website/course itself?

I just wondered what kind of experiences people have had with it. I have already completed the free versions of Code Academy's Python, Ruby, and HTML/CSS courses and it's taught me a lot, and I'm starting the JavaScript course today. I've learned a lot so far, but the Python course was quite buggy and I feel like the courses end just as soon as I start to get the hang of whatever language or skill I'm trying to learn. Plus, I don't feel like I'm getting enough practice with coding in general.

Is it worth the $19.99 a month? I'm unemployed at the moment, and I'm trying not to subscribe to too much. For what it's worth, outside of CodeAcademy, I have messed around with Microsoft Small Basic, and a friend of mine lent me some books on Python primarily. I also have at least been able to get some very simple Python scripts I've written to run on my PC.

So what's the next step here? I'm willing to put down the $19.99 for a few months at least if the general consensus seems to be that it's at least worth that much. I started to get into programming mainly to have another skill on my resume and break into IT, but for now I feel like an achievable programming goal would be to make a clone of a very simple video game (something like Space Invaders, Tetris or Asteroids), and move out from there.

TL;DR: Beginning programming and starting to grow beyond free CodeAcademy courses. Given my goals and experiences, is it worth it to pay extra for the pro version?

The quizzes seem interesting, and the personalized path is enticing, but has anyone subscribed and agreed that it was worth $60

@20bucks/month, Pro doesn't seem terrible. Anyone here try it?

Relatively new to programming, but I would say that I have a sound understanding of OOP fundamentals & I want to start branching out and creating my own projects/portfolio examples with confidence.

I have been using the free codeacamedy resources, as well as courses from lynda.com & other available resources across the web.

Just wondering if anyone has bucked up the $20/month & if it truly would be worth it?

Any and all feedback here is greatly appreciated.

Thank You

I have been trying to understand simple coding by following Codecademy Pro's direction. I have tried over and over and over again. Its not going to happen! I don't know if it's me or them. It's probably both.

Can anyone suggest an alternative way? I'm not going to renew my membership for codecademy again.

Edit: I find the practice exercises too confusing. I am trying freecodecamp and it seems much clearer.

I stared learning web development but I don't really enjoy CSS.

I'm considering paying for something interactive for programming, I was thinking about treehouse, i've got some courses on udemy but I really want to start something specific for software engineering.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks

I'm about finished with the codecademy lessons for python and was wondering if it was worth it to signup for the pro version of codecademy for access to projects? I could just use the projects posted here and around the internet to start applying what I've learned, but are codecademy projects worth $20?

I already know a little bit of python but want to reinforce it using codecademy. They have a free course but goes more in depth with pro and they have a computer science course that uses python. Are there better sources or would that work for me?