When comparing Team Treehouse JavaScript vs freeCodeCamp, the Slant community recommends freeCodeCamp for most people. In the question“What are the best resources to learn JavaScript?” freeCodeCamp is ranked 1st while Team Treehouse JavaScript is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose freeCodeCamp is:
Free for anyone who wants to take the camp.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Short videos
The short, engaging videos that TreeHouse provides for all of their courses make it easy to stay focused and absorb what is being taught. The short video lengths will help keep you from getting discouraged at the amount of material to be covered.
Pro Build projects as you learn
The JavaScript courses (and JavaScript related courses, such as jQuery) take the students through building various projects, such as lightboxes and web apps.
Pro Covers different libraries and resources in addition to plain JavaScript
Treehouse offers well over a hundred courses and the list is growing quickly. This means that not only can you learn JavaScript with Treehouse, but they also provide courses for a variety of libraries and frameworks (such as jQuery, Node.jS, Angular.jS, and more).
Pro Challenges for keeping the user engaged
Treehouse provides coding challenges throughout the courses. You code directly in their editor, and your code is checked to make sure it's correct.
Pro iOS and Android app
Treeehouse provides an app for both iOS and Android that is easy to use.
Pro Completely free
Free for anyone who wants to take the camp.
Pro Open source
Due to freeCodeCamp being open source, you are able to contribute to the program that helped teach you how to code in the first place. It's a great way to give back and gain experience.
Pro Self-paced
There is no set schedule with freeCodeCamp. You can work through the program as fast or as slow as you want.
Pro Browser-based
All courses used by freeCodeCamp are done in the browser, rather than students having to set up their own environment. This makes it much easier for beginners to get started.
Pro Actively developed
They are frequently updating courses and adding new material.
Pro Welcoming, active community
freeCodeCamp strongly encourages interacting with other learners and experienced programmers. They provide chatrooms which are always active and full of members happy to answer any questions you may have. Pair programming (programming with another user) is encouraged as a great way to work through some of their coding challenges.
There are also meetup groups where you can code in person with other freeCodeCamp students.
Pro Six certificates available
There are currently six certificates available that you can get once you've completed all the projects:
- Responsive Web Design Certification
- Javascript Algorithms And Data Structures Certification
- Front End Libraries Certification
- Data Visualization Certification
- Apis And Microservices Certification
- Information Security And Quality Assurance Certification
Pro Gain real world experience while helping nonprofits
Once you've completed all the courses and practice levels on freeCodeCamp, you are able to participate with other learners on developing software for non-profits. It's an amazing way to gain experience and build your portfolio as a developer, while helping out a non-profit organization.
Pro Full stack certificate
There is a cool Full stack certificate
Cons
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 forum lacks conversation/engagement
TreeHouse provides a a forum for students to have discussions. However almost all posts are students looking for answers to the quizzes and challenges. Any attempts at general discussions about business, learning, programming, job seeking etc. tend to go without replies.
Con No longer offers opportunity to build projects one-on-one with nonprofits
There are no nonprofits to help upon completing the program.
Con Learning material is not in-depth
The teaching content provided by freeCodeCamp tends to act more as an introduction than a solid learning resource. Unless you already have some prior experience, you won't have enough knowledge to get through the coding challenges and development projects without using outside learning resources to fill in the gaps.
Con Massive time waste
Content mainly focuses on trivial concepts and is very sparse in those few areas that inch beyond 'complete beginner'.
Con Is an email list generator
Early focus isn't on programming. It is on signing up for all of FreeCodeCamp's social media and getting looped into their newsletters. The content is trivial. It is all just a massive marketing scheme to get email addresses of aspiring programmers to affiliate sell to by pushing novice developers to blog posts containing affiliate links.
That is until they sell to a 3rd party. Read their disclaimer. Whoever buys them out gets all their user data, email lists, etc.
Con No offline version
Con Excessive focus on the basics
This platform focuses too much on the basics.