Putting Udemy in the rear-view
I've learned a ridiculous amount with Udemy courses and would be the last person to knock their platform. They offer some awesome courses on a wide range of topics that extend way outside of the technology space from some great instructors. With the review system, you know which courses to go to; obviously, you don't want to buy a course that's only been reviewed a handful of times or has a poor overall rating. Colt Steele gave me a great knowledge base for web development and really jump-started my learning when I was struggling with other resources. I took a great course on Vue by Maximilian Schwarzmuller that, in 25 hours, made me feel completely comfortable with Vue. Lastly, Andrei Neagoie took some very complex concepts and brought them down to the "Explain it like I'm 5" level, which is an excellent and underrated skill to have. I've now completed 6 courses on Udemy that span a total of 200.5 hours; this is the equivalent, in my opinion, of at least 2 years of courses at a University, with the same level of teaching I will be back to Udemy at some point; there are several courses still on my list and it's great for finding information on a specific topic. The one thing Udemy lacks, though, is continuity.
With Frontend Masters, there are several ways you can go about learning the curriculum. You could simply take courses hither and thither, just focusing on topics you would like to. You can follow a learning path on a specific topic, learning from scratch to expert level, say, React, Vue, or JavaScript. The final option, and the one I'm starting tonight, is to take their preferred path for beginners, professionals, or experts. I don't consider myself to be any one of these categories, but I'm definitely not a professional or expert, yet. Therefore, I'm going to be starting from the bottom. In the beginner level, there are about 40 hours of material, focusing on different aspects of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, topics I'm very familiar with, but that I could always use some work on. These are the foundations of web development, and like any good house, your foundation has to be strong. A part of me feels like I'm starting over, and that I'm going to be bored with these courses, but it's always good to hear material taught by a different instructor. I may think I know something, but there may be a better way to think about it. The first course in this curriculum is a general overview of web development taught by Brian Holt, going from HTML to NodeJS. It's about 11 hours, so I should be able to knock this out in a few days. From there, we get going with Kyle Simpson, considered one of the greatest minds in the JavaScript ecosystem, so I'm bound to expand my knowledge base in a hurry here. As you can tell, I'm sure, I'm very excited to start this next chapter in my learning career and take my skills to the next level.
It's worth noting my path to initially come to Udemy in the first place. I started learning web development through a site called The Odin Project. This site taught me some very valuable lessons early on, like getting my GitHub started and setting up my coding environment. However, all of the learning was based around reading tutorials online, and I was really struggling with this. I'm a strong reader, don't get me wrong, but I've learned in this whole process that I retain knowledge a lot better through video tutorials. If you give me a textbook with no instruction, it's no good to me. That's not to say that this style of learning wouldn't work for other people. In fact, it may have worked for me as well, but I think it would have taken twice as long. I kept seeing people talk about Colt Steele's "Web Development Bootcamp" everywhere I looked, so I decided it would be worth the $9.99 investment to at least check it out. This 44 hour course expanded my horizons in so many ways, it's indescribable. I definitely didn't master anything in the process of this course, but it gave me a great starting point and helped me understand what I needed to know more about to advance my knowledge. It painted the entire picture of web development, whereas before I had no idea where I was going once I got past JavaScript. I'll be sad to leave Udemy behind for a while, but Frontend Masters is going to be awesome!
Until tomorrow!
