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Add to SafariWhen comparing Udacity vs W3Schools, the Slant community recommends Udacity for most people. In the question“What are the best websites to learn to code?” Udacity is ranked 5th while W3Schools is ranked 21st.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Courses taught by industry professionals
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.
Pro Courses are easy to understand
Pro Actual feedback on coding projects
You get actual feedback from developers on your code, which is useful. Yes having your sites/apps do what it is supposed to do is important, but you need feedback to learn industry standards/best practices and other gotchas that are much harder to learn on your own.
Pro Language that is easy to understand
Courses are super easy to follow, even for super dummies.
Pro Worth the investment
Pro Easy to learn
All the tutorials are written in a straightforward and easy to understand way.
Pro Built in editor
Almost every example has a "try it yourself" button which opens up an editor in a new tab. It allows you to play with the example code and see how it works.
Pro Well organized tutorials
All of the lessons are separated into their own pages, which makes it easy to learn about specific concepts.
Pro Great source from Google search's perspective
Cons
Con Nanodegrees are expensive
Udacity is quite expensive at $200/month if you want to do a nanodegree.
Con Outdated practices / problem solutions
The practices that are shown to solve the problems at hand are rarely, if at all, updated. Usually, their tutorials and learning material is updated only after they see their profits drop.
Con Doesn't care about teaching right
There are multiple errors in the data they show. Although the solutions they show work, they will lead to unmaintainable code. That happens even when the maintainable code alternatives are as easy or accessible to new programmers as the alternatives.
Con Certifications not recognized
Many professionals in IT agree that w3s certifications are not recognized by them and are deemed useless. Good luck finding any respectable professional that accepts a w3s certification.
Con It is for profit
What defines what goes is and what gets fixed on w3schools is what gives them profit and what doesn't (through their ads system).
Con Written tutorials only
While many learning resources offer a mixture of media in their courses (such as videos, challenges etc.), w3schools offers only written tutorials and code editors. This makes w3schools more beneficial as a quick reference rather than a primary learning resource.
