I just wanted to give everyone a quick update. A started a new position in Nov 2018 with a company I’m programming in the ServiceNow ecosystem. That means that my ‘finds’ over the next little while are likely to be focused on ServiceNow quirks and techniques.
However, before I get into that, I wanted to talk about learning to program. I’ve mostly been learning on my own, and I’ve realized that there is a lot of difference between resources that you can use.
I started out using CodeCademy.com. They have a workspace built right into the browser, which I really liked initially. It seemed like a great option because that meant I could get right to the business of programming.
Since then, I’ve spent some time in the Team Treehouse tech degree program, on Pluralsight, and on this Udemy course: https://www.udemy.com/modern-javascript/
Here are my thoughts:
1st Point: Learning syntax can be challenging, but once you’ve got your arms around that, an even bigger challenge is getting your development environment set up so that you can start working on something other than tutorials. I think that is a big part of why people end up moving from one tutorial to another, which is why I highly recommend picking a course where they start out by setting up your development environment.
That is something that I really liked about the Andrew Meads Udemy course that I linked above. Andrew runs you through installing Node, npm, Visual Studio, and a bunch of other really useful tools.
2nd Point: It can be really tempting to go with a free resource when money is tight. I’m not advocating spending money that you don’t have, but don’t discount the value of your time. If you choose resources that don’t don’t do the trick and you double the time required to learn how to program, you’ll end up losing out on months of dev salary that will end up being much more expensive than the cost of a reasonably priced course of study.
3rd Point: The price of a course doesn’t necessarily correspond directly to the quality of the course. I quite liked what I saw of Pluralsight during the three days that I tried out their courses. My feeling is that I would have made much quicker progress if I’d started out with Pluralsight rather than starting out with CodeCademy.com’s free classes. However, Team Treehouse’s tech degree program, while costing $200 a month–much more than Pluralsight–came in behind Pluralsight for me.
In summary, out of all of the options that I’ve tried out so far, Andrew Meads’ JavaScript bootcamp course has been my favorite and I felt like the best value for the money. I liked the Team Treehouse tech degree in theory. You ‘graduate’ 3 months after starting with a tech degree that in theory makes you seem like less of a risk to prospective employers, and they have a Slack channel with moderators who can help answer your questions and get you through any difficulties you might have with the learning process. What I found was that the video courses were very uneven when it came to the quality of the teaching. I was studying Python during the month that I was enrolled in the tech degree program. I thought one of the instructors was really good. The other I found to be less skilled as a teacher, and some of his examples weren’t a very good match for the concept that he was trying to convey.
Likewise, I found the slack channel to be underwhelming. There were a lot of nice people, both moderators and other students, but when I asked questions, it seemed more often than not that the answer was something along the lines of ‘don’t worry about that now’.
I can’t speak to whether or not the tech degree makes someone more employable. It’s possible that there is enough value there to offset both the deficiencies I came across and the $200 per month price tag, but even with me spending 40 or more hours per week working through the tech degree, I found that I wasn’t able to maintain a pace that would allow me to get through the tech degree program in the 3-month minimum time frame, which leads me to me next point.
I started my Udemy class after beginning my new job in the ServiceNow ecosystem. That means that I don’t have anywhere near 40 hours per week to dedicate to JavaScript courses, but even so, my Udemy class–for the very low price of $10 or $11 has kept me busy for nearly 3 months, and I’m still not quite all of the way through the videos. The $600 or more likely $800 that I would have to spend in order to complete the Team Treehouse Tech degree would pay for something like 60-80 Udemy courses, and keep me busy learning for years.
Similarly, while I really liked the npm course that I took from Pluralsight, and I can’t say enough good things about the Sequelize class that I started, but didn’t get enough time to finish, I have a hard time right now justifying $35 per month to take Pluralsight classes when one month of Pluralsight would enable me to buy 3 high-quality Udemy classes that could very possibly keep me busy for 8 or 9 months.
Given that, and the fact that I’ve got a backlog of 4 or 5 Udemy classes that I’ve purchased but not yet even started watching, I expect that the bulk of my money will continue to go to Udemy for the next little while. That being said, I don’t think Pluralsight is a terrible value, and there are a couple of scenarios where I think Pluralsight makes a lot of sense.
If you’re already working in development, and your time is extremely valuable, then a course that is even just slightly better could save you enough time to justify paying 5 or even 10 times as much for a course as what you might pay for something off of Udemy.
Likewise, if you’re a company, and your employees need to learn something while on the clock, then the potential time savings involved in classes that are more tightly focused on just what your developers need to learn could justify Pluralight’s price point.
More importantly, because part of what Pluralsight ultimately offers is curation of their course catalog, you’re likely to find a very consistent level of quality across their offerings, which probably isn’t going to be the case with a course of study that is stitched together via Udemy classes from various instructors.
If you’ve got a lot of time to dedicate towards learning new skills, and some extra disposable income, then Pluralsight by all appearances can be a great way to go.
Otherwise, my suggestion is just to find a good Udemy class on the subject you’re wanting to learn (I highly recommend Andrew Meads’ class if you want to learn JavaScript). Even if you pick a bad one to start out with and have to purchase a second one, you probably still come out ahead compared to the other options–it’s just such an incredible value.
All of that being said, Pluralsight recently sent me an email with a limited time offer of a year for $199. It was very hard for me to pass up that deal. I suspect that if I didn’t have a big backlog of Udemy classes that I’ve purchased but not yet completed, and if I had an extra few hours a week that I knew I would be able to dedicate to learning new skills, that I would have jumped at that particular Plurasight offer.