I finished a 2-month full-stack JS class here in Seattle in June and really enjoyed it. I am/was primarily a LAMP stack/WordPress developer and wanted to expand my mind and skill set a bit. I was one of 2 or 3 people in the class who had more than a couple of months of programming experience (~ 6 years in my case), the rest were very new to the discipline.
I really enjoyed the process but it's very much a "get out what you put in" process. It was 6 hours per day, 5 days a week with homework. I could easily have doubled that time outside of class with additional reading, assignments, and projects. Still, I attended every lecture and finished all the assignments and now feel much more comfortable with the landscape in general.
The advantages a class has over self-directed learning are myriad:
- Paying for a class provides internal motivation to stay focused
- Someone helps you decide what to learn and in what order
- Most provide job-application assistance (my program in particular did an excellent job with this)
- You have someone being paid to answer all of your questions
- You have specific assignments to complete and are held accountable
- Teaching those around you is the highest form of learning
- You get a dedicated space to work and learn
From the other comments here, I fully agree that:
- 'The quality of the "graduates" varied immensely'
- 'All of the projects were group projects, so weaker students were able to hide behind stronger students' - you get out what you put in
- 'COLLECT AS MANY SIGNALS ABOUT INSTRUCTION QUALITY AS POSSIBLE'
- 'I also learned how to work on a dev team, not just in my app-building silo'
Comments
I finished a 2-month full-stack JS class here in Seattle in June and really enjoyed it. I am/was primarily a LAMP stack/WordPress developer and wanted to expand my mind and skill set a bit. I was one of 2 or 3 people in the class who had more than a couple of months of programming experience (~ 6 years in my case), the rest were very new to the discipline.
I really enjoyed the process but it's very much a "get out what you put in" process. It was 6 hours per day, 5 days a week with homework. I could easily have doubled that time outside of class with additional reading, assignments, and projects. Still, I attended every lecture and finished all the assignments and now feel much more comfortable with the landscape in general.
The advantages a class has over self-directed learning are myriad:
- Paying for a class provides internal motivation to stay focused - Someone helps you decide what to learn and in what order - Most provide job-application assistance (my program in particular did an excellent job with this) - You have someone being paid to answer all of your questions - You have specific assignments to complete and are held accountable - Teaching those around you is the highest form of learning - You get a dedicated space to work and learn
From the other comments here, I fully agree that:
- 'The quality of the "graduates" varied immensely' - 'All of the projects were group projects, so weaker students were able to hide behind stronger students' - you get out what you put in - 'COLLECT AS MANY SIGNALS ABOUT INSTRUCTION QUALITY AS POSSIBLE' - 'I also learned how to work on a dev team, not just in my app-building silo'