freecodecamp review reddit 2021

reddit.com › r › learnprogramming › comments › j54ae2 › is_freecodecamp_worth_it

My education came pretty much only from FCC. I just got done with my first week as a full stack web developer. It definitely can be worth it. That being said, as others have mentioned knowing your way around git and github and having your own personal projects there are a must. Answer from FearTheBlades1 on reddit.com

reddit.com › r/learnprogramming › a review of freecodecamp - the first 25 hours, from an intermediate learner who was a skeptic. tldr: it's fantastic and any beginner should jump at it.

r/learnprogramming on Reddit: A review of FreeCodeCamp - the first 25 hours, from an intermediate learner who was a skeptic. TLDR: It's fantastic and any beginner should jump at it.

March 29, 2016 -

Purpose This is a review of the first 25 hours(*) of FreeCodeCamp. It's a name that comes up here quite a lot, as a course recommended for beginners. Specifically, it teaches front-end and back-end web development, wholly in the flavor of javascript.

It has consistently (and very noticeably to me, as I lurk here most days) received a lot of praise in the comments threads on here, to almost any "Should I try FCC" type threads. In fact, the comments threads have been so uniformly positive that it aroused my suspicions that it was potentially astroturfing. That wasn't a grudge against FCC. It was really a product of innate spidey-sense that the internet develops in many of us, plus a more personalized scepticism: There's so many courses out there, how could this one be so good? And specifically, could it really claim to be a "one stop shop" for an aspiring learner?

This scepticism was heightened recently when FCC started an ad campaign (on Reddit) saying no one finishes their course because they all get hired before they finish!

Well, having decided that I have some unfinished business with my own (toehold intermediate) javascript learning, I decided to have a look.

(*) This review covers the first "25 hours" of FCC. That excludes the 50 hours allocated to (the first) two (of many subsequent) personal projects - building two (extremely) basic websites. I've done enough of that, so I skipped over that bit and followed the curriculum. The 25 hours is the estimated course time allocated by FCC to that part of the curriculum, and includes:

A little bit on onboarding
An introduction to HTML and CSS (5 hours)
Introduction to Bootstrap (if you haven't heard of it, chalk it up as more CSS really) (5 hours)
jQuery (3 hours)
Basic javascript; and OOP and functional javascript (10 hours; 2 hours)

(For any total newbies reading this, these are the elemental building blocks of making things visible on the web, and is the foundation to a career as a front-end web developer or tinkerer as well.)

Proof of completion of these units: http://imgur.com/AvRYzFb

Background I have been teaching myself code for about a 15 months, but with a very long break of about 10 months in between when I had to turn to a consulting project in my other occupation. I did no learning or practice at all in that period, so all told it's about 5-6 months of leaning, in my own time.

For the purpose of benchmarking, I'll set out roughly what my learning curve looked like:

A couple of months with Treehouse and Codeschool
Read a few books (the two books by Jon Duckett, and some other books on Javascript)
After that (and in conjunction with continuing reading), built a bunch of projects based on some $10 coupon courses I bought off Udemy, and sourced on YouTube (very good source if you are prepared to sift through a lot of dross)
Probably around the same time as this, headed over to Codecademy to fill in some gaps on my jQuery and JS OOP especially - did the whole thing and flew through the bits I thought I knew
Continuous - bits and pieces as I need them in Bootstrap and specialist CSS topics etc, sourced from all over the place - eg Linda.com, more YouTube, more Udemy
Did a bit of Udacity on Git and learned the command line somewhere along the way.
Build a bunch of websites off my own initiative along the way, almost continuously - many of them simple, even silly experiments really (can I get an array to pop up like this on a screen) - these have been very important

Anyway, I'm not here to show off my progress or do a victory lap as I haven't got a job yet, so all this is really to set out what I approached FCC with. I believe I'm fairly well acquainted with what's out there, both if you spend some cash and for free.

Review

FCC is a very fine program and I would recommend it unhesitatingly to anyone as either a starting point, or anyone who is looking to consolidate their initial education in front-end webdev gained anywhere else. However, it should be pointed out (and it does not qualify the previous recommendation) that -- based on what I have seen -- I very much doubt that it is a one-stop-shop to getting hired. But stop chasing that unicorn anyway. It's fantastic and your should do it.

I flew through the course reasonably quickly as you'd expect, on and off over a handful of days in the last week. The time estimate of 50 hours for the material I mentioned above is about right if you're a total noob taking on these concepts for the first time.

This section of the course gives you some very early satisfaction in seeing you put some results up on the web. You'll gain (just barely) enough information to have a genuine web page up on the internet with some basic styling.

These initial units in HTML and CSS (and Bootstrap) are nothing more than the basics however. The same goes for the jQuery module. You're taught just the bare minimum to scrape something together to put up on a web page. The instruction however is incredibly shallow, and the concern I have is where anyone gets real skill in CSS sufficient to know really anything about what they're doing. I don't recall, for instance, anything about the concept of floats being discussed. I think someone relying solely on this instruction would lack a basic vocabulary sufficient to be able to imagine what CSS is really about.

The same could be said of the Bootstrap and jQuery material. There is no doubt this leaves you with a ton to learn. While that is true of any course of instruction, this material really does only just scratch the surface. While Codecademy's jQuery course gets you into toggle menus, dropdowns and carousels, you won't find those possibilities even hinted at in this material. It's all $(.class).css("color", "red")

I have two takeaways here. One paradoxically is: it is great that they introduce Bootstrap and jQuery so very early in the program. In my experience, I spent more time in a state of anxiety about these big features approaching on the horizon, than in took actually to learn the basis of them. It really is great to give you a taste of these up front and get that anxiety out of the way.

On the other hand, I did not notice any further material in the course at all on those topics (save for jQuery events and AJAX a little bit later). On the CSS side especially, the course leaves you with a huge amount to learn on your own steam. Of course, some of this may well be picked up in the personal projects you need to make as you progress, but you are going to have to acquire that knowledge on your own, and you may lack even the basic frame of reference as to what the possibilities are.

On the javascript side however I think the course is superb. I haven't seen dedicated material on events handling -- this seems to be left entirely to jQuery. So again, a bit of a blackspot there, but that's an easy enough one to fill in.

But what is here in the javascript sections is really, really solid. There appears to have been a huge investment of focus in programming details that many others skip over or miss out - you do a lot of array methods for instance, and then you apply these in some really interesting and quite challenging algorithm tests, like this one:

// my solution code for "Factorilize the number 5

function factorialize(num) {
var factor = 1;
var numOfFactors = num / 1;
for (i = 1; i <= numOfFactors; i++ ) {
  factor *= i;
  console.log(factor);
  }
return factor;
}

This is a really fantastic little program to be writing at only ~50 hours of instruction in! And the course drills dozens, even hundreds of these tests. This was the actual attraction to me for doing FCC at this stage, being to fill in some of these gaps in programming analytically like this.

These little projects may seem quite abstract, but when it comes time to make your own programs, and you're looking blankly at an array thinking "how do I get these things to appear this certain way in this order on the screen", it is stuff like these challenges that will really sort you out.

Conclusion I highly recommend it. FCC is not a one-stop-shop and I have to say I don't think there's a one-stop-shop in existence. I don't think there can be. (Here, for example, is a NINE HOUR course just on CSS page layouts: https://www.lynda.com/Web-Interactive-CSS-training/CSS-Page-Layouts/86003-2.html.). No one course simply "has it all".

If you're a beginner and you're asking "I'm interested in web development, should I try FCC", my answer is unequivocally: Yes.

However, if you're asking "Should I do FCC or Codecademy or [otherCourse]" my answer is, do them both.

Top answer

1 of 5

Quincy with Free Code Camp here. I don't think we've ever proclaimed that FCC is a one-stop shop, and I agree with the OP that you should be skeptical of such claims. Here are a bunch of other free resources that we recommend our students for filling in the gaps: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/25-free-resources-for-new-javascript-developers-11342cf1f4df#.tuc8r5zav

2 of 5

Never used JS before, but what does this line do exactly: var numOfFactors = num / 1; Isn't it the same as var numOfFactors = num;

reddit.com › r/learnprogramming › is freecodecamp worth it?

r/learnprogramming on Reddit: Is freeCodeCamp worth it?

October 4, 2020 -

I mean, it's obviously free of charge, but does it make me hireable? I already am going to school and I'm learning coding, but the teachers are just... How is it that I can understand the explanations better at freeCodeCamp than at school? I kind of want to quit school and stop paying for it and make it on my own, but I know that there are probably many employers that are like:"YOU NEED A DEGREE!!" no matter how good my portfolio is.

Has anybody ever gotten a job only with freeCodeCamp? It seems really good. It's better than Udemy etc. Tell me your story, please.

Top answer

1 of 6

My education came pretty much only from FCC. I just got done with my first week as a full stack web developer. It definitely can be worth it.

That being said, as others have mentioned knowing your way around git and github and having your own personal projects there are a must.

2 of 6

I've heard a lot of people say it's worthless and others say it's amazing. It's really personal preference. No doubt though that a degree will help you more than any online course. Also, no one source will be enough to make you hireable. You probably need to go to school, get a degree, build tons of personal projects, learn new tech on your own, etc etc. Just doing one of those things isn't nearly enough to gain the experience required to be successful.

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