It's been half a year since I completed a web development boot camp.

[fuzzybabybunny]

I made a post half a year back about my experience taking a boot camp.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2387366

I've been coding pretty solidly since then and have improved quite a bit since completion of the course. I feel that I now have a much better perspective in which to talk about the course.

Some background for me - I wrote some very simple procedural PHP before the course. I didn't have a solid understanding of HTML, I was very weak with CSS, and I didn't know JS or jQuery at all.

In summary: I was a little unhappy with my course.

No swearing in the tech forums -- Programming Moderator Ken g6

Right after the course I felt that it was pretty good, but as I got more experience I noticed that I was struggling with some really fundamental stuff that simple wasn't covered much:

Objects.
Access and create values in objects using dot and square bracket notation.
Accessing and creating nested values in objects and arrays.
Loops - For, For-In, Do-While.
JavaScript (at the time I thought we had covered a useful bit but after having so much difficulty with objects after the course I realized that we didn't cover shit)
jQuery
Bootstrap (especially the Grid)
CSS
Rails Models
Ajax

We covered all of these, but the class didn't drill us over and over on these fundamental topics. We didn't have quizzes. No homework to turn in. No exercises.

I ended up tutoring 5+ people who had graduated the course. Some of them graduated the course not knowing how to write a function or how to access values inside of an object. Many had no idea how jQuery worked.

I later became a full-time TA and the new instructor and I decided to hit the fundamentals HARD based off of my insistence. It was here where I realized that there simply are no admissions requirements for students - the bootcamp business takes anyone. And the prework is laughable - there is zero coding logic in it.

The past courses have always focused on CoffeeScript, which IMO is EXTREMELY poor for teaching newbies how to code from scratch. It is simply NOT visually descriptive enough and new coders have zero idea what's actually going on with the code. So we did JavaScript hard and related it closely to algebra ( f(x) = x*x, for example). We console logged console and array so people could see how everything in JS is an object. When we went into Rails on week 4 we showed the Object-Oriented nature as well. For the record, I also hate Rails for beginners who are just getting into CS. Objects are so much harder to visualize than in JS, and the fact that documentation usually writes function calls without parenthesis or curly braces makes everything so ambiguous for newbies.

link_to "Profile", controller: "profiles", action: "show", id: @profile

^^ for a newbie, WTF is this saying!?!?!?

As a result of having no admissions requirements, despite hitting the class hard with fundamentals for a solid 3 weeks, I could tell that 30% of the class will simply have no way of catching up to a meaningful degree, having come in with zero computer experience and/or very very poor analytical skills.

So I guess my advice for those who are considering one of these 3-month coding boot camps is to do a LOT of work beforehand, especially JavaScript.

Do all the Codecademy and CodeSchool HTML, CSS, and JS/jQuery courses before even starting the course.

 

[Farmer]

It is useless to try to teach people who cannot meet basic qualifications. By this I mean, basic intellectual aptitude (for instance, a minimum SAT score). I truly mean useless, both teacher and student should find more productive things to do with their time and money. Trust me, I have tried, some people just can't "get it" or are not left-brained enough.

Second, I believe it is always best to stick with tried and true undergrad CS curricula, which are very effective at producing good programmers GIVEN said programmers meet requirements. This means to begin with either C or Python, and learn compiler/linker/interpreter behavior in parallel, along with systems concepts. Once this foundation has be established, branching out to object oriented languages or more modern scripting languages should not be difficult. The hallmark of a good programming education are labs: 50-hour or so open-ended projects that are elaborate enough to frustrate and educate, make a person debug at least 1000 lines of code, make decisions regarding data structures that will be critical to program performance, etc. A good example would be, say, writing your own garbage collector.

I would not consider learning markup languages like HTML or CSS as programming.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

It is useless to try to teach people who cannot meet basic qualifications. By this I mean, basic intellectual aptitude (for instance, a minimum SAT score). I truly mean useless, both teacher and student should find more productive things to do with their time and money. Trust me, I have tried, some people just can't "get it" or are not left-brained enough.

Second, I believe it is always best to stick with tried and true undergrad CS curricula, which are very effective at producing good programmers GIVEN said programmers meet requirements. This means to begin with either C or Python, and learn compiler/linker/interpreter behavior in parallel, along with systems concepts. Once this foundation has be established, branching out to object oriented languages or more modern scripting languages should not be difficult. The hallmark of a good programming education are labs: 50-hour or so open-ended projects that are elaborate enough to frustrate and educate, make a person debug at least 1000 lines of code, make decisions regarding data structures that will be critical to program performance, etc. A good example would be, say, writing your own garbage collector.

I would not consider learning markup languages like HTML or CSS as programming.

Yeah. To clarify, this was a web development boot camp, so it had to include HTML and CSS. JS is the programming language of the web on both the front and back end now, so that's what we started them out on.

I completely agree that some people just can't get it. And there are those who could possibly get it had they had more preparation and prework and preexams (which they didn't).

Unlike other classes, we had labs and mini projects.

Create and deploy a simple site using only HTML5 and proper semantic markup.

Copy an existing site's main page from scratch using HTML and CSS and image tags.

Copy a more complicated site's main page and make it fully responsive using bootstrap grid.

Some people could hardly get past finishing up a navbar on their own.

Then JavaScript and jQuery

Create a simple shopping cart and calculate the total price of the items in the cart.

Create a more complex cart where you can add and delete items previously not on the cart.

Use High charts to create a chart using ajax to grab data from an open API data source, and then add annotations to the chart and do full CRUD on each annotation by saving the data to a second API.

Create a math game that generates random math questions of varying difficulty and sets a timer that you must beat.

The problem with the projects is that the people who were behind from the start simply didn't finish them. If they did, it was due to instructor hand holding and it was clear on subsequent projects that they had forgotten a lot of what was gone over.

I see this as similar to getting into pull ups. From the start you might need to use an elastic band to help you through 10 straight pull ups. The point is to get through the entire motion. Doing 2 full pull ups and then eight 10% pull ups doesn't do you much good. But this was the situation we were forced into with our exercises because there were no admissions requirements.

 

[purbeast0]

it sounds like the problem is the class doesn't teach you concepts but just teaches you syntax and how to do things. programming is a concept more than anything. i remember my first computer science courses, where over a whole semester you did like 5 or 6 programming assignments. that isn't that much when you think about it. but it's because you have to learn a lot of concepts and the idea behind programming. you have to learn how to think like a programmer and think logically. it sounds like the course did not teach you any of that, but rather threw you in the weeds.

which isn't necessarily bad though, because like you said, it's a bootcamp for web development. but i'm pretty sure if you threw 90% of the people into another language or programming aspect, they probably would be completely lost. it sounds like you would get it, or at least grasp the concepts. it sounds like you've also learned HOW to program and you "get" it. but as you said, a lot of people probably didn't.

at my job i used to write software that other developers would use to make their own applications inside of our framework. it's now an open source webapp project but i don't work on it anymore. i used to teach 3 day classes on it. and i saw the same things you are talking about. these people were supposed to already be developers, but many of them were not. but we taught the class as if people already had knowledge of JS and many concepts, but some got left in the dust.

 

[TridenT]

Uh, not all bootcamps are like this.

In fact, the ones that I know people take are usually more in the <5% acceptance rate pool where they only accept people who have done some coding, are really good academics, and so forth. Pretty much everyone I know who has done coding bootcamps (at least in SF) has come from Ivy League or similar level private colleges.

So... yeah. YMMV. I know one guy who did some kind of bootcamp in Seattle and had an something like an English degree from a local public university. But I have no idea about the quality or rigor of that camp. The ones in SF that I know of are hard to get in.

 

[Albatross]

Why did you do it?For a job as a web dev or to build your own stuff?Would you say you are employable now?Thanks.

 

[Maximilian]

OP what do you think of Codecademy? Is doing the HTML/CSS/Javascript/JQuery enough to put together an interactive site?

Im gonna have to build an interactive website with a database at some point in the coming year for a uni project and tbh im absolutely lost... Ive no idea where to start! Should it be a java EE thing or should I do the whole thing in javascript and how would I go about doing that, what IDE to use, whats a web framework. Wiki is so... verbose in explaining these things. We all get assigned a tutor for this project but id like to get a bit of a head start and have at least a vague idea of wtf to actually do before I start.

I miss it just being me, netbeans and the java class libraries lol.

 

[Ken g6]

Im gonna have to build an interactive website with a database at some point in the coming year for a uni project and tbh im absolutely lost... Ive no idea where to start!

If you want to discuss this further, please create a new thread about it. For now I'll just add...

I miss it just being me, netbeans and the java class libraries lol.

Given this I'd say you should start with Apache Tomcat.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Uh, not all bootcamps are like this.

In fact, the ones that I know people take are usually more in the <5% acceptance rate pool where they only accept people who have done some coding, are really good academics, and so forth. Pretty much everyone I know who has done coding bootcamps (at least in SF) has come from Ivy League or similar level private colleges.

So... yeah. YMMV. I know one guy who did some kind of bootcamp in Seattle and had an something like an English degree from a local public university. But I have no idea about the quality or rigor of that camp. The ones in SF that I know of are hard to get in.

I know that Hack Reactor in SF is competent. Admissions is low and the program focuses a lot on solid skills.

Other programs' success rates are mild at best. Their marketing can be amazing though which is what draws people in. I believe that it varies by region too. SF may be a solid choice. In emerging markets the programs will generally try and get in as many paying customers as possible, and that means admitting people who have no business of being admitted.

Why did you do it?For a job as a web dev or to build your own stuff?Would you say you are employable now?Thanks.

I did it to build my own stuff and also to know what to look for when hiring people to work with. Learning this stuff on your own is really difficult because there are so many facets to everything, so many languages, and documentation is really really bad for beginners trying to break in (documentation sucks even for people like me who have been immersed in this for a while). Plus it's hard to motivate yourself to learn this stuff while building a project - most people like to just follow the instructions that Codecademy and CodeSchool give you but I guarantee you that doing just that will do you no good - you have to work on an actual project out in the wild. Having experienced people by your side to ask questions and show you how things fit together is invaluable.

Right out of the program I don't think that I would have been employable, despite what I may have wrote in my old thread. You can't be employable if you don't know how to do CRUD on objects. And I didn't. Or understanding how JS links with the HTML.

I only became employable after 3 or so months after the course by working hard on my own stuff, which is where I figured out all of these basic things on my own like objects and functions and jquery and selectors.

I also have a pretty technically-inclined brain. I have zero problems with logic or math. Sadly, there were some people in the class who didn't know how to calculate the average of a list of numbers or figure out how many miles you would go in 5 minutes if your speed was 5 miles per second. They did not fare well.

OP what do you think of Codecademy? Is doing the HTML/CSS/Javascript/JQuery enough to put together an interactive site?

Im gonna have to build an interactive website with a database at some point in the coming year for a uni project and tbh im absolutely lost... Ive no idea where to start! Should it be a java EE thing or should I do the whole thing in javascript and how would I go about doing that, what IDE to use, whats a web framework. Wiki is so... verbose in explaining these things. We all get assigned a tutor for this project but id like to get a bit of a head start and have at least a vague idea of wtf to actually do before I start.

I miss it just being me, netbeans and the java class libraries lol.

Like I said above, Codecademy and CodeSchool are ok, but a lot of the time they fail to give you the big picture and most people simply follow the instructions, do the exercises (or worse, buy all the answers if they get stumped), and learn nothing at the end.

Understanding the logic isn't learning. Being able to read code and know what it's doing isn't learning. Being able to follow directions isn't learning.

You've only learned something when you can, from nothing, figure out what you need to do and then DO that thing that you just figured out from a blank document.

CS and CA absolutely do not give you these skills if you're just starting out, but it seems like you have a background in this, so these courses may actually be helpful.

As far as I'm concerned, there are a few things you need to do.

1. Do these courses.

2. Create different websites and exercises on your own.

3. Ask a ton of questions.

Maybe do #3 first. Feel free to ask me anything more specific (or general). It's critical to get the lay of the land first, figure out how things fit together, and then do, do, do.

BTW, a Framework is pretty hard to understand until you've first coded something without a framework and then go TO a framework afterwards. Seeing the contrast for yourself personally is a million times more explanatory than having someone try and describe it to you. You can totally "get" the explanation, or feel you get it, but I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that you won't actually get it until you use it.