At the beginning of July, I started a course on front-end web development taught by the Meta (Facebook) team on Coursera.
It goes through 9 mini-courses in which it teaches you, from the introduction to how things on the Internet work to preparing for a coding interview over six months. I so far have completed the first 18-hour course and am working my way through Programming with Javascript (a 42-hour course)
By the end, you earn a certificate from Meta, which covers the most popular web development (including the library React, which Meta developed for Javascript)
The first course (Introduction to Front-End Development) introduced the core fundamentals of the Internet, how a server transfers info to a web browser, the most used languages, and basic HTML and CSS. It also discussed what to expect when beginning a programming career. It briefly covered how to incorporate libraries, what a Javascript framework is, how you’ll use it, etc.
Compared to CodeCademy, it seems to be much more focused on what you should expect and prioritize what you would use in the real world. There is a lot more “in the field” of practical applications than the abstract way of teaching that Codecademy felt like, which focused on getting everything explained at once, instead of the way Meta prioritized the very basics and briefly introduced more complex topics that would be explained later when they’re needed.
The course formatting usually goes like this:
- Intro video to a concept (with examples of real-world use cases it can be used for)
- a follow-up, more in-depth reading section (for example, an intro video to Javascript Arithmetic would be followed up with a reading section with every symbol variation and their use cases.)
- In the next exercise, you will use the examples you previously learned in several specific case code snippets. (If you were learning how to use Arithmetic symbols, it would have you create a couple of different variations of equations based on what you learned before.)
- Then, you have either a practice quiz or a quiz that reviews all the topics learned before, giving you examples of code snippets and asking you how they will be outputted.
Module one of the second course (Programming with JavaScript) has taught me basic Javascript, such as for and while loops, fundamental variable assignment, arithmetic in Javascript, and if / else statements.