Today I bought the mini-version of a bundle I saw on boingboing’s store, I wasn’t interested in paying full price for anything and I mainly go on the site for freebies and giveaways however at the bottom of the bundle was a course called “JavaScript Programming Complete” I could get the “mini-bundle” and get access for a minimum of $1. I decided I would buy access to the course and write about my experience with the course here. After reading, let me know what you think of this review. Well, here it goes…
Summary of what this course teaches you:
The following concepts are taught in this course,
- Variables
- Arrays, functions, conditionals, loops, mathematical / comparison operators.
- Objects, Strings, Dates, and Numbers
- Editing the DOM & Elements with Javascript
- Javascript Events
- Changing CSS with Javascript
- Basics of jQuery
What I liked:
- The course does show javascript in action on a webpage. That might be attracted to people who are new to Javascript.
- The course focused primarily on achieving an immediately visible effect with javascript, it’ll probably get people who have never coded before excited about stuff.
What I didn’t like:
- The course says it’s for absolute beginners however you actually need to know basic HTML and CSS to be successful in this course. It’s not a big deal since I already know HTML and CSS (and javascript for that matter) though it might upset someone who didn’t realize they’d need to know HTML and CSS first.
- In the introduction of javascript video, he opens a warez download sites (illegally downloading cracked software) and shows how a social network share content wall is improving the website. There are so many examples that didn’t need to involve showing warez downloads. It just gives me a bad impression of the course.
- Rather than writing out an HTML Document the person copies the source code of example.com from a browser into Notepad++ - it gave the course a bad impression to me from the start.
- The use of the console to teach concepts is ignored and basically the course teacher edits an HTML document to show how javascript is used in an actual web page. This is nice for newbies who want instant results however I disliked this.
- The Stackskills Website would often freeze on me, and I’d have to close and reopen the tab to continue the course.
Bad Practices:
- Often the teacher would type html attributes without including the quote marks around them.
- The coding exercises are in a .rar file hosted on some random file host, it might just be that Stackskills will only host video/text content but not files, it seems a bit sketchy to me. The files look ok though. (nothing that appears to be malware after decompression).
Would I recommend this course to a friend?
I wouldn’t recommend this course to a friend, the course markets itself as learning complete and comprehensive javascript when that’s simply not the case. It barely scratches the surface of things. It might be good for someone who wants to learn the basics of using Javascript on a web page but it’s by no means an everything you need to know course. It also includes several bad practices that should be avoided from day one.
Cost:
I got the course as part of a mini-bundle (I paid $1.00 USD, I didn’t want the entire bundle, you have to pay $20~ish for all the courses, but Javascript was the freebie if you didn’t want to pay the average price) however Stackskills prices it at $99USD. So it’s costly but I saved money and reviewing this course was affordable to me. What I will say is that due to many things that gave me a bad impression from the start, it’s not worth the $99USD pricetag.
If you are interested in saving money / getting the full bundle view this link, https://store.boingboing.net/sales/pwyw-learn-to-code-2017-google-go.
Link to course: