Web Development Courses Overview

In a note, I will talk about my experience in taking courses on web development in schools: specialist , loft school , html academy , learn.javascript.ru . This post will be interesting to everyone who is interested in web development and seriously thinks to make it their work. Similar thoughts occupied me 2 years ago. Then I worked as an engineer. Now I work as a frontend developer in a bank, supporting a decrepit website on Bitrix and developing a new one on react, so the training was not in vain. I am periodically asked questions where you can learn web development and where to start, so I decided to systematize my experience.

So, I decided that courses with a clear training plan, assignments and verification by the teacher (mentor) is the shortest way to my goal, it turned out that way. But the courses taken were very different, and I took them specially in different schools.

I started with the first issue in the issuance of Yandex (for 2016), the school " specialist ". I attracted the opportunity of full-time study in the Moscow branches of the school, it seemed like a more fundamental approach with the possibility of personal communication with the teacher. I went through two courses: html basics and js basics. Knowledge is given to the most superficial. And topics are divided into many sub-courses. The course on js consists of 3 parts, costing 12-15 tr. Now in 2019, a specialist has a jQuery course divided into 2 parts and a Knockout.js course. You can combine this into a specialty legacy developer. The division clearly has a marketing basis. It seems that the structure of the lessons and the material are not interesting to the teachers themselves. The knowledge gained is barely enough for the content manager, not to mention the developer. For example, layout is done on float, the method is not the most progressive at that time.

Further, my choice was more informed, reading reviews on forums, articles, podcasts, youtube. And the next school for me was the loft school . From here I count my experience as a developer. Here I first tried a working workflow with git, webpack, pull request. Two-month js course " comprehensive javascript", from the basic methods to the development of training projects with VK api, Yandex maps, drag'n'drop. In parallel, the theory of prototypes, closures, asynchrony, mv * patterns, etc. All this in a quality presentation from Sergey Melyukov seems capable to answer any question on the web. On the whole, the course is great for pumping skills. But there are also disadvantages. Mentors, although experienced developers, each have more than ten students, of course, they may physically miss at all times. Of course, if you take the most responsible approach to the process and remind about homework mentor "He will check it. There are a lot of tasks, it’s better not to accumulate them ... At the end of the course there were materials and videos online on React and Angular, as an overview of the possible continuation of the training. The quality of the presentation is noticeably lower than the course of Melyukov, which creates a negative impression and lubricates the ending. But it's the little things in general, the course is worth the money. I'm reviewing some videos so far.

Required level of preparation : the textbook https://learn.javascript.ru/ part 1 sections 1 - 5, part 2 sections 1 - 2. For admission, you must pass a test task that will allow you to check your level. I redid 1 time.
Necessary time for training : in my case, about 20 hours a week.

The next one, strangely enough, was the html academy layout course. Separately, it is worth noting the teaching staff. The course was taught by the founders of the Academy, Aleksey Simonenko, Alexander Pershin, and a rather well-known community Vadim Makeev, whose podcasts became a beacon for me in the world of the web. I must say that I expected to tighten the layout. I thought that the course would be easy, even began to doubt whether to take react immediately. But the course turned out to be very saturated. The mentoring system in the academy is, in my opinion, the most successful. Here is a whole base of mentors, for each of no more than 3 students, I was lucky to be the only student at the mentor. The quality of job verification benefits dramatically from this approach. Several times my homework was deployed for revision. Pixel perfect, accessibility, work flow through git, all in an adult way. The final task is checked in addition by an independent mentor. You can choose a mentor at the beginning of the course from a whole base, by rating, experience or by photo, that's how anyone. During the course, full access to the tasks of the academy is opened, which is also very nice, if you pass them in parallel, then it definitely won’t be boring. Interactive tasks of the Academy, a must have for any novice front-end or layout designer. In general, if you characterize this course in one word, thisquality . In everything: material, presentation, mentoring. The difference with the specialist seemed to have shifted from the mod on the BMW.

Required training level : interactive html academy courses, beginner level, intermediate level (free part)
Required time for training : in my case, about 20 hours a week.

The last course I took, during which I got the first job as a developer, was react from learn.javascript.ru, which leads Roman Yakobchuk. I must say that the course caused mixed impressions. And partly this is my fault. The level of my training was insufficient. The course takes place rather in the format of a master class, in which the teacher shares best practices. Despite the large amount of time spent, I did not always have time to complete all the tasks, and they simply do not check after the allotted time, since there are no mentors and everything falls on the teacher’s shoulders. I had to go back to already completed and disassemble in more detail. In general, maximum awareness is required here. In fairness, I must say that I already passed the second part of the course as a student, because I got a job as a front-end developer and there was simply not enough time for everything. In general, the course is good but requires thorough preparation,

Required level of preparation : tutorial https://learn.javascript.ru/ part 1, part 2. Experience in developing an application on React, at least to do.
Necessary time for training : in my case, about 40 hours per week.

Of course, the developer’s training process never ends, but the article should have an end and this road map ends with a job and a new “June Path” begins. With its priorities, a technology stack and a checklist at the end. So it was in my first company where, in my opinion, I was lucky to get there. So, for the device for the first job, I spent about a year on training and about 75 thousand rubles for courses.
Now looking at the past 2 years. I can say that I do not regret the time and money spent, I like my new job, interesting tasks, satisfaction from the developed solutions and the created interfaces.

I want to finish with a list of links to the training portals that I used. If this topic is relevant, I can prepare a check sheet on which I was preparing for interviews.

1. https://htmlacademy.ru/ Interactive courses on HTML CSS and JS.
2. https://learn.javascript.ru/ JS tutorial, with tasks.
3. https://www.sololearn.com/ Simple interactive CSS CSS JS courses
4. https://github.com/azat-io/you-dont-know-js-ru is a bit more advanced on JS, parsing complex topics.