Man, it feels good to cross something big off my list.
I started on 5/12/19 and worked on it for a few hours each day, then took a long break from the course and left it at 90% for a while. But in the past 2 days, I made an effort to just finish and boom, I am done now!
It says the course is 43.5 hours, but there are 2 sections that are debatable in usefulness. The first is a 1hr 44min Q&A with Angela, while interesting, it should have been linked to a Youtube or something so it doesn't inflate the hour count towards the course. The other is a general module on design and colors, not specific to coding which was about an hour long. It has some uses, but I am not sure it belonged in this course. In all, I spent about 63 hours on the course (not counting the 2 above modules), watching it and working through the challenges. I did admittedly go very quickly through the HTML and CSS parts that I was already familiar with on 2x speed, or sometimes marked completed because it was too basic. The rest of the content, I normally watched on 1.5x speed.
Here's part of the review I submitted for the course posted on Udemy:
Pros:
Angela is a charismatic, humorous, and gentle teacher. Her teaching style works really well for me as a visual & project based learner. She is very clear and concise in her explanations. IMO she speaks too slow, but Udemy allows you to adjust the video speed so this is no big deal. Angela will demonstrate and along the way and will frequently ask you to pause the video to complete mini challenges. I found this to be my preferred style of teaching in the video format. And since it is not 100% coding along like some other courses, I retain information much better. Whereas in the code along type courses, I find I am too focused on trying to catch up to their coding to pay as much attention to the concepts as I should.She has some “boss level” challenges at the end of the major sections. Here you work on what you’ve learned in a big project such as creating a tinder site for dogs (cute), dice game, simon says game (this was an excellent project), creating your own blog/cms, among other projects. For these boss challenges, she prompts you to write a bit of code in each step. There are many steps along the way. By the last step, if you did everything correctly, you will have a complete and functional app. This really helps hammer in the fact that coding is basically tiny steps and not to get overwhelmed.
Not all the other instructors/courses do this, but Angela will code through the solutions after each challenge and will explain through each step. This can get repetitive if you are already comfortable with the content (which you can then totally skip her challenge reviews), but for the parts that were tricky for me, this was a godsend.
The video production values are excellent, very professional, always on par and often times above some Lynda courses. Her course also gives you access to the discord channel where you can get help from other students or even make some new coding friends (like I did!).
My favorite parts of the course was probably going through the Simon Says challenge and the Security and Authentication section (learned tons here).
Cons:
IMO, she spends too much time on jQuery and Bootstrap, with a big project on Bootstrap itself. However, if you are just starting from the very beginning, I think Bootstrap is good to know to get practice with a framework and getting used to thinking about CSS in divs.CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid are noticeably missing from the course, but hopefully she will add a section on these later.
Also missing are working with or at least introductions to the big JS frameworks out there: React, Angular, and Vue. I know it gets tricky to pick one framework for such a course, but they should at least be introduced at a high level. Students need to be aware they exist. I also wish she covered debugging a bit (not the sexiest thing in the world, I know). Even so, the cons do not detract from the content that is already there.
TLDR:
Angela’s course and teaching style works perfectly with my learning style (visual & project based) as she often challenges you to complete steps after demonstrating how to do it. I recommend this course to anyone looking to learn about web development, if you are starting from scratch or even if you have some experience.If you take your time like I did, you will learn a lot and get so much value from this course. Since Angela often updates the content based on student feedback, the ROI keeps getting better. Will taking this course turn you into a web developer and get you a dev job? Probably not because you need to practice what you learned and apply it to your own projects. But will it give you a strong foundation to do so? HECK YES!
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