GitHub vs Treehouse

GitHub is the largest code host on the planet with over 21.4 million hosted repositories and many users. It's unarguably the largest VCS used by developers worldwide and as such, it has a vibrant community that follows it resulting in many guides and tutorials for new users. Even experienced developers can always find an answer to any question they may have.

GitHub's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information.

For example, the repository view displays only the most crucial data about that repo - on the top it displays the number of commits, branches, releases and contributors. When clicked, each of them will take the user to a page that displays more detailed information.

GitHub has integrated issue tracking that makes hunting and solving bugs easy. Each project's issues page can be filtered by closed issues, assignees, labels and milestones. Issues are also sortable by age, number of comments and update time.

GitHub Pages is a feature that allows developers to create websites for their projects or anything they need a static website for, for free.

Any user can fork a project and submit a pull request. If accepted by the owner, the fork will be merged with the master branch.

GitHub is the largest host in the world for open source projects. Developers from all over the world fork and work on countless projects hosted on it.

GitHub's search box is a powerful tool that allows developers to find open source projects in areas they are interested in and where they can immediately start to contribute.

GitHub also has a page dedicated solely at exploring and finding open source projects, grouping them by each topic they cover. In the same view, GitHub displays trending repositories and sorting them by day, week or month.

Gists is GitHub's way to easily share code, text snippets or any kind of information with the world. They are an easy way to share text and they work as Git repos, which means that they are forkable and versioned. They are also fully compatible with Git.

GitHub has easy and useful features to control teams, large and small alike. Team members can be given different powers on different projects, ranging from the ability to create them, to only being able to have read-only access.

GitHub can be integrated with Travis CI for code testing and deployment, furthermore it is free of charge for free open-source projects.

GitHub has added another layer of security to their user accounts. This layer comes in the form of Two-Factor authentication. After it's enabled, GitHub delivers an authentication code by SMS, or by a free application for smartphones. After two-factor authentication is enabled, the authentication code is sent to the account owner's phone any time someone attempts to sign into their GitHub account. This means that only someone who has both the password and authentication code can sign into the account.

Many widely used cloud hosting services are easily integrated with GitHub. Any project hosted on GitHub can be set up on these services in seconds. Some companies that offer this feature are:

• Amazon Web Services
• Google Cloud
• Heroku
• Windows Azure

GitHub allows maintainers to make code reviews mandatory for any repository they choose.

GitHub supports searching code. Whether it's from a specific project or from the whole website. What's more, GitHub has excellent SEO and you can easily find any line of code hosted on public repos on GitHub even from Google.

GitHub has native apps for mobile (iOS and Android), Windows and Mac, which make code deployment easier and faster.

GitHub offers very good student discounts along with other things, such as AWS credits.

For those with a valid .edu email or valid school ID there are additional benefits such as free private hosting. While it may take time for the account to be verified, it can easily be worth it.

GitHub has a tool called (quite intuitively) "Projects". It helps teams to organize and prioritize the work they are doing by creating roadmaps and release checklists.

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.

Their animations and screenshares supplement the instruction, giving a really good all-around learning experience.

Materials are very well made and it'll get you started with the technology as fast as possible. Haven't found tutorials that well made and understandable.

Nothing is skipped or assumed without reference to courses within that were recommended to you earlier. This makes the site an efficient review resource if you ever forget a basic concept.

Soup to Bits videos show you how to build an app step by step in real time. Each is short and digestible yet illustrates many relevant new concepts.

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 Development (see the list here).

You don't have to install anything to your computer and can learn from anywhere using their Workspaces.

The effectiveness of this tool cannot be overstated. Even though instructors often preface courses with installation guides to setup popular environments the Workspaces allow you to jump right in, mimic the examples, work on your project, experiment with tangent thoughts, or even complete parallel courses simultaneously, within separate Workspace instances. Execution is very fast and space is ample.

Most TreeHouse courses allow you to build interesting real-world projects that make for a fun way to learn how to apply what you've learned (such as apps, websites, UI elements and more).

TreeHouse releases multiple new courses every month on various different topics. They do an excellent job of keeping pace with a changing industry. For example, they released courses on Swift not long after Swift was released.

If you're stuck with an task you can easily get help on their forum.

Most topics are visited by hundreds of students per day and responses are often returned within minutes if not seconds. In case your question cannot be answered by the imminent community, they can be pushed to recommended members or staff experts for prompt responses.

Criticizing the lack of advanced material seems unjustified considering how consistent the paths are with the costs and transparent intentions. Advanced resources are usually politely introduced then passed over.

Treeehouse provides an app for both iOS and Android that is easy to use.

You can share courses that you successfully completed when you're applying for a job. Probably after completing course you have a solid understanding in given technology.

The community is very supportive and the company convincingly more interested in your positive referral than in your subscription, though both is obviously preferred. Besides recognition and gamification, your timely progress is actively encouraged. There are even employer monitored sections with suggestions of how to meet career goals with related skills.

You can get a student discount easily using their email support.