What is the best alternative to The New Boston video series?
Pro Community trust
Instead of getting a recommendation from a single dev, you get recommendation from the entire programming community.
Pro Recommendation for every programming language/framework/library
You can find Python as well as Jenkins.
Pro Nice filters
Free, Video, Book, Beginner, Advanced, etc.
Pro Great instructors
The course formats are flexible enough that instructors are able to employ their own styles so long as exercises are offered in consistent intervals and student progress is measurable. The instructors communicate very clearly and are very approachable.
Pro Great material presentation, instruction, and visualization
Their animations and screenshares supplement the instruction, giving a really good all-around learning experience.
Pro Learning tracks
Trying to figure out what language or tool to learn can be frustrating. TreeHouse groups their courses into learning tracks so you have more guidance, based on what type of development you want to do. Some of the tracks they offer: Web Design, Front-end Development, Full-Stack Javascript, and PHP D...
Con Credit card required to sign up for the free trial
Treehouse offers a free 14-day trial, but requires a credit card to sign up.
Con The quality is inconsistent among courses
Treehouse has multiple teachers in order to provide such a variety of content. However there is a lack of consistency with teaching styles - Some courses provide content that is well explained and goes at a reasonable pace. Other courses can be quite hard to follow. The challenges are also inconsis...
Con Regular participation is essential
This is not a good place to skip ahead and work backwards from a specific need. In fact, even skipping sections you have mastery in can be risky since the condensed material relies heavily on past examples.
Pro Human review and feedback
Rather than merely test for code correctness, Exercism uses peer review to improve general programming techniques. Users are encouraged to comment on others' solutions, and refine their own based on feedback.
Pro Practice with production tools
Unlike many code practice websites, Exercism requires the user to develop and test entirely offline, submitting only the finished code. This promotes familiarity with essential tools and workflow, not just the bare language.
Con Custom commandline client
Exercism requires using a CLI utility to fetch and submit exercises. This is inconvenient compared to web-only alternatives, and poses an additional barrier to entry for some users.
Pro Extensive
There are a lot of different languages to choose from thanks to their large offering of courses (almost 4000 total that cover various subjects).
Con Lacks a community
With no user forum, there is very little opportunity to engage with other students and discuss the learning material.
Con iOS and Android apps are somewhat poor
Compared to the experience available on the web, the mobile apps are severely lagging behind.
Con More ways to help retain the information would be helpful
More quizzes, tests and assignments to help practice and retain the presented information would be helpful.
Pro Practice the code after each video
After each video, there are a series of challenges that give you a chance to apply what you just learned. The great thing about these challenges are that they force you to think through a problem, and use the new skills to solve it. It's not just regurgitating facts; it requires some effort.
Pro Paths for learning different skills
While you can jump into any video you like, there is also the option to follow a path for what you are wanting to learn. These give a nice direction if you are wanting to improve on a particular area and guide you into what to do next. They currently offer Ruby, Javascript, HTML/CSS, and iOS.
Pro Fun and engaging teaching style
The instructors often use humour throughout the videos while letting their passion for the topic show.
Con Requires paying to complete courses
Although the beginning of each course is free and you can see if you are interested in pursuing it, to complete the course you must pay.
Con A bit too basic
There is not a lot of advanced content.
Pro Good mix of theoretical and practical material
The class includes written materials, lecture videos, and lots of code exercises to practice Python coding. These materials are used within Google to introduce Python to people who have just a little programming experience.
Pro Great for people with little programming experience
This is a free class for people with a little bit of programming experience who want to learn Python.
Con Some programming experience is required
While the courses cover the very basics of Python, basic understanding of programming is needed to start learning from Google's Python class.
Pro All courses are self-paced
Courses are always made available which means there is no waiting for the specific course you want to run. You can work through the courses as fast or as slow as you want.
Pro Offers Nanodegrees
Udacity offers a few different Nanodegrees which provide access to various different courses, project reviews and coaching support for $200/month. Current options include Front End Web Developer, Data Analyst and Android Developer. See the full list here.
Con Nanodegrees are expensive
Udacity is quite expensive at $200/month if you want to do a nanodegree.
Pro Offline learning mode for mobile apps
Allows learning while disconnected from the net.
Pro Easy for beginners
Anyone can get started with this.
Con Only the most commonly used languages are covered.
C++, Java, JavaScript, C#, Python, SQL, PHP, Swift, Ruby, JQuery, HTML, CSS. You won't find anything less common like Haskell, Erlang, Elixir, Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Rust, etc.
Con Limited usefulness for intermediate or experienced programmers
No advanced coding challenges. Look for those on other sites like hackerrank.
Pro Best source for the most up-to-date information
The guides are actively maintained as they are the official guides for Android.
Pro Free
Available online for free.
Con Requires some programming experience
The guide is much better suited for those who have programming experience.
Pro Free versions available
The book is available for free in PDF and HTML formats. A hardcover version can be bought from Amazon.
Pro Beginner-friendly
Think Python is a free book designed for those with no background in programming. It starts with basic concepts of programming, and is carefully designed to define all terms when they are first used and to develop each new concept in a logical progression. Larger pieces, like recursion and object-o...
Con Some missing instructions for absolute beginners
Some exercises sometimes require taking steps that aren't explained. Some functions and commands are used without explaining their purpose.
Pro Free
Available online for free.
Pro Entertaining
The book includes drawings and jokes that can make the learning process more enjoyable.
Con Entertainment can be distracting
Being entertained while learning is not for everyone.
Pro Reinforces concepts through fun interactions
Code Avengers makes their material engaging and interactive, which aids with understanding and retention of the material.
Pro Full of context
Explains what everything is before you must use it, unlike Codecademy, which just kind of tells you to do stuff. To figure out what everything is exactly, you must either look at the glossary or google it.
Pro Wide selection of courses
Not only do they offer Python, CSS and HTML, and all the works, they offer them in context packages, where you can work on a project that utilizes one or the other. Also, there are different recommended tracks for different purposes - web designer, etc.
Con A little slow
It may be slow, but that's only because it's thorough.
Con Limited selection of courses
Compared to many other paid learning resources, Code avengers currently has a limited number of courses to choose from.
Pro Will teach you to think like a programmer
The projects are designed in a way that allows you to visualize how OOP (object oriented programming) concepts fit together from the ground up.
Pro Awesome instructors
The instructors (Mike and Nicole Clark) have a very clear and concise teaching style.
Con High cost
The course is quite expensive, with a regular price of $199 (current sale price is $149).
Pro Community backed solution reviews
Users can publish their solutions for different problems and other users can review the code and give their opinions on how they would have solved the problem. Sometimes, some of the most active users get their code reviewed by Guido Van Rossum (the creator of the Python language) himself.
Pro Available in multiple languages
CheckiO crowdsources translations for problems. Currently problems have been translated in 10 languages. So it's highly possible that eventually more languages will be supported.
Pro Ability to create new challenges
New missions can be created and uploaded using GitHub. After that is done, it's suggested to CheckiO and if it fills all the requirements after being reviewed by a CheckiO team member, it's pulled into the game.
Con Not for absolute beginners
CheckiO does not teach syntax, instead it teaches how to solve problems using a particular programming language therefore some basic programming knowledge is required to start.
Pro Learn to make native apps
No cheating straight up native apps.
Pro It's free for now
Codebrainer.com offers free courses on Android development. And they don't use an App builder.
Con Beginner courses
Codebrainer.com is new to the scene and for now they only have beginner courses.
Pro Actively updated
The blog is updated with a new post once a week.
Pro Free
Available online for free.
Con Not a good starting place for beginners
The blog assumes some knowledge of Android development.
Pro Covers a lot of different subjects
This is an extremely large book at around 3500 pages. The table of contents is extensive, with topics ranging from the process model to power drain and memory leaks.
Pro Updated frequently
"The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development" is frequently updated (every couple of months) to insure all information is relevant.
Con PDF only
The updated versions are no longer available in print, and are only available for purchase from the site in PDF.
Pro You'll come away knowing the Ruby language itself
This course teaches Ruby as a language, so you'll not be tied to a specific library or framework.
Pro Good for people completely new to programming
If you've never programmed before, you can come away from this with a better understanding of programming and the Ruby language.
Con Doesn't teach computer science
Maybe this is a pro for some people, but there is really no computer science taught in this course aside from the basic structure of a programming language.
Con Teaches Ruby and nothing more
You'll come away from this course with a general knowledge on how to program in Ruby, but it won't really teach you how to create a real-world project or how such things work.
Pro High quality courses from well known universities
Many courses offered at Coursera are from well known universities (such as Stanford and Princeton) and instructed by their professors. Often the material taught in the Coursera courses is material from the actual university course.
Pro Wide selection of courses
Coursera offers over 1000 courses on a variety of different topics. Courses are offered on learning to code and specific languages, but there is also a large selection of courses that would be beneficial to someone wanting to learn more about computer science as well (algorithms, data science, comp...
Pro Courses offered in a variety of languages (with transcriptions available)
Coursera offers courses from all around the world, resulting in courses taught in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Turkish and a long list of others. Transcriptions for a large number of languages are offered for each course.
Con Courses are not always available
Courses are run on set dates, though some courses provide access to the material whether or not the course is running (however, there will be far less student activity in the forums when the course is not running). Some courses only make their material available when the course is running, so you...
Con You cannot take the full courses for free
While you used to be able to take courses for free and earn a statement of accomplishment, this is no longer the case. You can only audit the courses if you are not paying. Coursera makes it seem like you should also do the quizzes, but the submit button says "Upgrade to submit".
Pro Beginner-friendly
It serves as a tutorial or guide to the Python language for a beginner audience. If all you know about computers is how to save text files, then this is the book for you.
Pro Free
'A Byte of Python' is available for free online. It's a book on programming using the Python language.
Con Some mixing of versions
A Byte of Python is a book about Python 2, but includes some Python 3 code.
Help millions of people make better decisions.
Each month, over 1.7 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.