I've committed myself completely to the full stack web development course through
Code Academy, and it's going quite well.
My goal for the coming week is to complete all the courses leading up to Ruby and Ruby on Rails before I attend the
Melbourne Ruby meetup next week.
My main priority is Ruby, so at this stage I am interested in the other components of the full stack only insofar as they are strictly needed for working with Ruby on Rails. Once I've completed the main modules of all the courses in the stack, I'll go back and complete the supplementary exercises to sharpen my skills.
At the moment, this is how it looks:
Having spents years fiddling with basic Python and BASH, none of this is particularly difficult, but I commend Code Academy on putting together courses that give a good introduction to each language and framework. I was a little bored by the HTML & CSS course because I came into fairly comfortable with both, so my only recommendation would be for Code Academy to consider a way of giving the equivalent of RPL (Recognition of Prior Learning) to students who can pass certain tests with ease.
For example, if someone already understands what a boilerplate is, a few questions on a test would bear this out and that portion of the course could be marked as completed automatically. Instead, I had to slog through material I already knew back to front.
Still, I strongly recommend the course. I feel that it is working well for me, and will commence the next stage of my journey towards a career as Ruby developer with confidence upon completion of these courses.
