Back to the beginning

I completed my foray into Udemy's library of courses yesterday and started Frontend Masters' curriculum last night. I've decided to start at the beginning and, while some of this stuff turns out to be very basic, I'm still picking up some tips and tricks I missed the first time around. There are several paths you can take with FEM, the main 3 being beginnner, professional, and expert. The beginner path starts with an 11-hour course covering web development in a general sense, teaching the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, while later touching on NodeJS and Git. So far, I'm 6 hours into this course and have completed the HTML and CSS sections. Now it's on to JavaScript. So far, the JS section is starting out as an outline of the general rules, such as types of variables and if-else statements, which I'm happy to hear again from a fresh voice. Brian Holt teaches this course and so far I really like him. He's worked at Netflix and is now a developer for Microsoft, so his resume speaks for itself. He's a great instructor and is able to break it down to the beginner level, which can more difficult than one would think. I'm hoping to finish this course within the next 2 days and start the next one by Monday, today being Saturday.

After this course, the curriculum moves on to an introductory course on JavaScript, taught by Kyle Simpson, who is touted as a genius when it comes to JavaScript. Then, the curriculum moves on to "CSS Grids and Flexbox for Responsive Web Design," taught by Jen Kramer. I love CSS and am really looking forward to advancing my skills in this technology with Jen. I don't know much about her, personally, but I'm sure she's a great instructor if she's included on this platform. After that, it's back to JavaScript with Bianca Gandolfo and "JavaScript: From Fundamentals to Functional JS." The final course, beyond the elective coursework, is one by Jon Kuperman called "Mastering Chrome Developer Tools," which I expect to by eye-opening. I know the dev tools are way more powerful than the basics that I've used them for, so I'm excited to become more advanced with these tools. The elective coursework covers website accessibility and search engine optimization, two topics I haven't delved into deeply at all yet. In total, I'm looking at about 40 hours to get through the beginner courses. I should learn a lot in these courses, but I'm really looking forward to getting through this path and getting into the more advanced topics.

Now that I've made the leap into Frontend Masters, I couldn't be happier with the decision. I'm exploring the site more and realizing how much content is really on here. It looks like there are workshops constantly adding more content, as well, which means they may hook me in for more than just a few months. Initially, I expected to get through most of the content fairly quick and then cancel the subscription once I had exhausted all resources. On the contrary, it looks like this site is still in the beginning stages of growth and there is a lot more content to come. I don't think the price tag is unreasonable, and I can justify if I'm able to get 50-70 hours of content out of it per month. Really, if you look at it that way, that's way less than $1 per hour of content, which is definitely worth it.

Until tomorrow!