So my One Month Rails class is the biggest class on Skillshare at the moment (5000 students) and I can't echo this point enough:
"Here's why Codecademy doesn't work in the long term... You don't know how to set up a development environment. Any time you have the slightest inkling to build something for yourself leveraging what you've learned in Codecademy, you can't and probably don't know where to start."
I'm all for encouraging a solid understanding of the syntax of code, but it's a totally different skill set from building web applications – which requires an understanding of topics like MVC, authentication, authorization, deploying, and using 3rd party libraries (and which to use).
This is the kind of stuff people want to learn when they talk about learning how to code and most sites bait and switch them into learning loops, variables, and functions.
"Here's why Codecademy doesn't work in the long term... You don't know how to set up a development environment. Any time you have the slightest inkling to build something for yourself leveraging what you've learned in Codecademy, you can't and probably don't know where to start."
I'm all for encouraging a solid understanding of the syntax of code, but it's a totally different skill set from building web applications – which requires an understanding of topics like MVC, authentication, authorization, deploying, and using 3rd party libraries (and which to use).
This is the kind of stuff people want to learn when they talk about learning how to code and most sites bait and switch them into learning loops, variables, and functions.