I just began using Free Code Camp and have been pleasantly surprised with the amount that I have learned in the first few days. What drove me to it initially was the fact that it gives young coders am opportunity to build a portfolio by working with non-profits.
Breaking into any new industry your going to run into challenges. The most obvious for me being: how do you get a job with no experience? And, how do you get experience with no prior job? What comes first? FCC seems to have addressed this question by trading an education for volunteer work, an idea that I find respectable and logical.
As of this evening I have gone through the first three modules (HTML, Responsive Design with Bootstrap, and jQuery) and have learned lots about the respected languages, but more importantly, I have sharpened my "googling" skills when I run into road blocks. This is one thing I noticed when switching from codeacademy to FCC; there is an encouragement for students to figure out the problem themselves before asking for help. Although CodeAcademy's Q &A section can be very helpful, I also think that it hurt my learning when I would look for someone else's answer instead of figuring it out with my own resources-- aka the internet. FCC also has an active chat room and a very helpful community.
Overall I have been happy with FCC. It's structure is very similar to CodeAcademy, however, there is a huge incentive to finish as it will give you the opportunity to work with non-profits on real world projects. I hope to burn through FCC in the next couple of weeks while also supplementing my learning with Marjin Haverbeke's book Eloquent JavaScript
So far so good in the new world of coding.
-John
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