Keeps Going and Going...

After completing my CS Prep course by Codesmith yesterday, I'm back at it trying to finish up Colt Steele and Stephen Grider's The New JavaScript Bootcamp. I have to give it to Udemy for the value you get in buying some of their courses. For about $10, I received over 50 hours of really high quality instruction on JavaScript. It's true that the majority of the courses on Udemy are not even worth your time, let alone $10, but if you know where to look, there is some serious value to be had. I've taken 3 courses by Colt Steele, and they have all been of really high quality. There are also several other instructors I've come across that also offer really high-quality coursework. If you compare the price-point of these courses to other platforms, it's unbeatable. If you read my blog regularly, you know I'm a huge fan of Frontend Masters which, for $39 a month, you get access to their entire library of coursework. With Frontend Masters, you know the instructors are some of the best in frontend development and the quality of almost every course on there is really high, so you can skip the research and just jump right in. Other platforms, like Egghead.io, also have a similar business model as Frontend Masters and are just as good, but then you have platforms like Coursera that will charge you hundreds of dollars to take courses. I think if you listen to the communities surrounding development and do your own research, you can really grab some great courses from Udemy and learn a ton while adding projects to your portfolio along the way.

I knew all about Colt Steele before taking this course, and knew his half of the course would be great, but I didn't know much about Stephen Grider. After starting the course, I talked to a mentor of mine, Matt Bear, and asked if he had taken any of his courses. He had taken several of his courses, and thought he was a really good teacher. Matt hasn't steered me wrong, yet, and I value his opinion about this kind of stuff very highly, so I expected Stephen to be really good. My expectations have been blown out of the water. Stephen really knows his stuff and takes his time to walk through some really complex code in a way that is really easy to follow. We've gone through some really difficult projects and he's broken it down to make the projects look really easy. We had 2 Node projects that could have been taught in about 5 minutes by a bad teacher, but he took over an hour with each to really break the code down and walk through each minute step to the point where I felt really comfortable implementing it on my own. Stephen has about 25 courses on Udemy, and I'm really looking forward to working through some of his other courses. Particularly, he has a course or 2 on GraphQL, one on TypeScript, and then a couple courses on React and Redux which I think will prove to be really useful. Beyond that, I'm sure there will be interests I have down the road he can help out with.

For the past few sections of the course, we've started working on an e-commerce site written entirely in vanilla JavaScript. E-commerce sites have a lot going on and can prove to be very complicated. For example, a user typically will have some way of logging in, adding items to their cart, checking out, and all sorts of stuff in between. This means a server typically becomes very handy, if not necessary. So, in these last few sections, we've been working on creating an Express server. Most recently, we have been working on some really interesting stuff with encrypting passwords and saving them to a JSON database in the server. So far, we've created a way to sign up, sign in, and sign out. We are using cookies in the browser to save user information and access that information from the database. This code has proven to be much more complicated than the rest of the course, but again, Stephen has taken the time to process through everything. This project spans over 10 hours of coursework, but I could see other instructors creating this project in a course in just a few hours. The amount that I would learn from that 3 hour course would be just a fraction of what I'm learning in this course. I'm really excited to see how this project turns out.

Until tomorrow!