Review of web development courses

In this article I will talk about my experience in passing courses on web development in schools: specialist , loft school , html academy , learn.javascript.ru . This note will be interesting to anyone who is interested in web development and seriously thinks to do this with their work. Similar thoughts took me 2 years ago. Then I worked as an engineer. Now I am working as a frontend developer at a bank, supporting the old site on Bitrix and developing a new one on react, so the training was not in vain. I am regularly asked questions about where to learn web development and where to start, that's why I decided to systematize my experience.

So, I decided that courses with a clear curriculum, assignments and testing by the teacher (mentor) are the shortest way to my goal, and that’s what happened. But the courses passed varied greatly, and I took them specially in different schools.

I started with the first issue in issuing Yandex (for 2016), the school " specialist ". Attracted the possibility of full-time study in the Moscow branches of the school, it seemed to be a more fundamental approach with the possibility of personal contact with the teacher. I passed two courses: html basics and js basics . Knowledge is given the most superficial. And the topics are divided into many subcourses. The course on js consists of 3 parts, cost 12-15 tr. Now in 2019, the 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 the structure of the lessons and the material is not interesting and the teachers themselves. The knowledge gained is barely enough for the content manager, not to mention the developer. For example, the layout is done on float, the method is not the most progressive at that time.

Then my choice was more informed, reading reviews on forums, articles, podcasts, youtube. And the next school for me was loft school . From here I count my experience as a developer. Here I first tried working workflow with git, webpack, pull request. Two-month course on js " integrated javascript ", from the basic methods to the development of training projects with api vk, Yandex maps, drag'n'drop. Parallel theory on prototypes, closures, asynchrony, mv * patterns, etc. All this in the quality feed from Sergey Melyukov seems to be able to answer any question on the web. In general, the course is great pumping skills. But there are also disadvantages. Mentors, though experienced developers, but each has more than ten students, of course at all times may be physically lacking. Of course, if you take a very responsible approach to the process and remind you about the homeworking mentor, he will check it. There are a lot of tasks, it is 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 possible continuing studies. The quality of supply is noticeably lower than that of the Melyukov course, which creates a negative impression and lubricates the ending. But this stuff, in general, the course is worth the money. Watching some videos so far.

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

The next thing I strangely had was a course on layout from html academy. Separately, it is worth noting faculty. The course was led by the founders of the Academy, Alexey Simonenko, Alexander Pershin, and a fairly 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, I even began to doubt whether to immediately take react. But the course was very intense. The mentoring system at the academy is in my opinion the most successful. Here is a whole base of mentors, for each of not more than 3 students, I was lucky to be the only student at the mentor. The quality of job verification benefits greatly from this approach. Several times my homework unfolded for revision. Pixel perfect, availability, work flow through git, all over the adult. The final assignment is checked in addition by an independent mentor. Mentor can be selected at the beginning of the course from the whole database, by rating, experience or by photo, this is someone as. During the course, full access to the tasks of the academy opens, which is also very nice, if you go through them in parallel, you will not be bored for sure. Interactive tasks of the academy, must have for any novice frontendder or coder. In general, if we describe this course in one word, this quality . In all: material, feed, mentoring. The difference with a specialist as if moved from frets to BMW.

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

The last course I went through, during which I got a job as a developer, was react from learn.javascript.ru , which is taught by Roman Yakobchuk. I must say that the course has caused mixed impressions. And partly this is my fault. The level of my training was insufficient. The course takes place more in the format of a master class in which the teacher shares the best practitioners. Despite the large amount of time spent, I did not always manage to complete all the tasks, and they simply do not check after the allotted time, because there are no mentors here and everything falls on the teacher’s shoulders. I had to go back to the already passed and disassemble in more detail. In general, maximum awareness is required. For the sake of justice, I should note that I have already passed the second part of the course as a listener, since I got a job as a front-end developer and I simply didn’t have enough time for everything. In general, the course is good but requires thorough preparation, then knowledge will be beneficial.

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

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

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

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