Previously I'd completed and written up some thought's on Free Code Camp's Scientific Computing with Python and Responsive Web Design certifications. I think people found those helpful, so here I am with some thoughts on their JavaScript cert, and hopefully it'll help some people decide whether it's worth it.

First - how long did it take? I didn't really time myself, but I'd estimate about 60 hours. It's a bit hard to say because I spent some of that time *thinking* about coding challenges and some of that time looking at other tutorials when I didn't understand certain lessons (more on that later). There are 7 'learning sections', 2 'scripting challenge' sections, and a final section of 5 projects that need to be completed in order to earn the cert.

Out of the three programs I've completed from FCC, this JavaScript one seems to be the most polished. Like the Responsive Web Design program, everything is done in the in-browser editor, which makes it really easy if you computer hop or can't set up your own dev environment. So I was able to complete a lot of this program with my work computer while on my lunch break.

Because I'd previously learned some Python, I was able to breeze through about 75% of this course. Many of the core concepts are the same, so I just had to learn a lot of syntax differences. There is a Regular Expressions section early on that I had some struggles with, but it turned out to be very important for many of the scripting challenges. In fact, I ended up using RegEx in 2 of the 5 final projects.

Speaking of the final projects, I didn't think any of them were too difficult. The final "Cash Register" project was the one I had to think about the most. But if you could figure out the core functionality of each project, it was easy to quickly finish them. There was no tedious output formatting like the Python cert had. I think these projects were pretty well designed. But most valuable were the basic and intermediate algorithm scripting challenges, which really forces you to use all the concepts you've learned.

Still, I think there are 2 flaws with the FCC JavaScript cert:

First: while most of the program is paced really well, once you get to the Object Oriented Programming and Functional Programming sections, the difficulty ramps up very fast. You are presented with big walls of text and (relatively) big chunks of code to figure out. The OOP section I was able to get through because I'd learned a lot of those concepts in Python, but a lot of the functional programming stuff (especially the .map and .filter functions), I had to just go and watch other tutorials on the subject. Also, I just had a hard time getting recursion down (and I still need to go and find more tutorials on that).

Second: The program is pure JavaScript. Nowhere do you learn how to use JS to interact with HTML & CSS. I think that's a big hole in the program. The next cert is on stuff like Bootstrap and React. So I guess the vanilla JS+HTML stuff is just skipped over?

Aside from that, I think it's a good cert to get (even if the cert doesn't really mean anything). I learned a ton, and I'm glad I did it.