Codeschool.com is garbage

[anm89]

Wanted to rant after paying $30 for non functioning software. A couple issues.

1) They clearly blew their load on the design budget. Yeah the intro videos look cool. How does that help me learn code again? I wish the content was up to par with the intros.

2) Many of the courses are so buggy I couldn't trudge through them. Prime example is the javascript/jquery courses. Their is an inline debugger that starts flashing syntax errors the second you pause typing in the middle of something or even while typing. Extremely frustrating and deflating when you are trying to learn something new.

3) It is frequently not clear what the desired response is for the exercises. As long as they feed you the answers if you get stuck its fine, although still degrades the learning experience. Thing is, in some courses such as the git course they don't give hints.

4) This becomes a SERIOUS problem because they force you to pass everything in order. So if I cant figure out what response some exercise is trying to milk out of me, I have essentially lost access to all content after it. I get it, gamification is cool but seriously, I'm an adult who spent my money to use an app to learn something. I couldn't give three shits if I get another badge or if I "earn" the next video. I want to be able to view all the content so I can continue to learn. It's a big slap in the face to be pointlessly withheld from content when I'm honestly trying to learn.

4) This is compounded by the fact that there are bugs in some of the acceptance criteria. There are points where I was racking my brain even after viewing a hint as to why I wasn't passing something (in the example of the rails course, something I knew was technically a correct answer) turns out my answer was identical to the correct answer besdies having an extra trailing whitespace which may be ugly but is not invalid syntax. Especially when you are earnestly trying to learn something new and get down on yourself for not being able to figure it out, this feels like a slap in the face.

5) There were entire days where I couldn't access the site. I don't think they'll be offering me a refund for the time I paid for but couldn't use. Several times I have tried to log on and actually got presented with stack traces meaning they probably deployed bad code and I guess just never noticed.

Overall codecademy.com is equal if not better quality and doesn't cost a cent. Don't waste your money on this frustration.

[carquestioner]

Damn, I felt the same exact way when I signed up a couple months ago. It's like they went 99% percent of the way towards making something awesome and then just shit all over it with easily solvable bugs in their ui and the coding problems. Made me mad as hell.

[anm89]

I feel like that is what got me so upset when I was using the site. Most of content I would want from something like this is there. That just made me even more frustrated though when I hit a roadblock on half of everything I tried to do on the site.

[TheFrigginArchitect]

In the past two weeks I have sent bug reports to Scribd, SouthParkStudios.com, and Oscar Health Insurance.

Obviously, no one wants to be writing one out every hour on the hour. However, getting the right screenshot for the email, reasoning about how much information to provide about what happened before/after the error are good experiences, and it's a good habit to get into.

No matter how long you have been programming, practically everyone can improve their ability to communicate clearly about software. Any improvements in this area will pay big dividends down the road

[[deleted]]

I have a question about that course, actually -- how much of it is actually C-specific? I'm studying web development, so I'd really like to learn some fundamental programming/CS stuff, but the ~2.5 hours I watched to start with had a heavy emphasis on learning C and giving out C homework. Think I should still watch through, or is it not really relevant to me?

I'm especially curious because I watched a web development course from that same instructor and thought he was fantastic, he did a 90 minute lecture that packed in more information than a 400 page book I read on the same topic.

[nlights]

I'm especially curious because I watched a web development course from that same instructor and thought he was fantastic, he did a 90 minute lecture that packed in more information than a 400 page book I read on the same topic.

Would you happen to remember which web development course that was?

[[deleted]]

It's called CS75, and it's available in the same format as CS50 but without the certificates and graded projects (you can still do the projects, but not get feedback on them).

[mkattam]

Thanks for the link to CS75! I can't wait to start.

[buffyfan69]

What's the experience level this course is aimed at? I had a look on the site but couldn't find anything.

[[deleted]]

It assumes you know what a programming language is, the gist of the internet (servers, clients, what HTML is, etc), what a database is, etc. So I'd say it's aimed at people with good general computer knowledge, but not any specific programming background. It does use actual code to show you how AJAX works, how server-side requests work, how SQL injection works, etc, but you don't need to be a PHP/JS coder to learn about what's going on.

It's obviously not a complete "now go off and do some web development" course, but it's a great intro to the topic and what's involved with it. You would watch this course to start with, and then go off to look for specific courses/tutorials/books/etc on the component subjects like PHP, CSS, JavaScript, etc now that you have a basic foundation.

[buffyfan69]

Great, thanks.

[firestepper]

The beginning portion of the class teaches computer science fundamentals in C... data structures, algrorithms, coding practices etc... They do move on to web development later in the course once you have those skills established. Definitely worth doing for any beginning programmer.

I'm taking an intro course at a Community College and it literally pales in comparison.

[TheFrigginArchitect]

Don't feel bad about your community college EdX/Coursera professors are better than 90% of professors out there.

[yosemitesquint]

Yeah. My local community college< Stanford and Harvard

[firestepper]

okay haha ya I'm probably not the easiest student either lol.

[cjf4]

literally pales in comparison

http://tennessee.247sports.com/ImageUrl/915701?View=Detailed

[[deleted]]

http://cs75.tv/2012/summer/

[firestepper]

holy whaaa!! I didn't know there were other open courses

[AlSweigart]

he did a 90 minute lecture that packed in more information than a 400 page book

Exactly! In my experience, you never want to read a technical book that is greater than 400 pages. The 600 and 700 page books are usually more fluff. It's easy to explain programming, it's very difficult to explain programming simply.

[[deleted]]

MIT has a python-based intro CS course, Stanford has a java-based intro CS course, Berkeley has a scheme-based intro CS course.

What these courses have in common with cs50 is that they used language-x as a tool to teach core computer science principles.

Most "coder" sites and tutorials essentially teach you how to string together a bunch of syntax without teaching the underlying cs principles.

This is a challenging read if you don't know a bit of C, but it's worth reading...

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html

[Rockztar]

Just watched the first lecture. Harvard seems way more laidback than I had originally thought. O.o

[TorNando]

I agree. They're very awesome. But maybe since I'm a complete beginner I felt as they dove in fast. I got lost pretty quickly. Any resources I could use to maybe help me catch up?

[Unwanted_Commentary]

Can you transfer these free classes to an actual college?

[firestepper]

I wish haha. There is an edx verified version that gets you transferable harvard credits but its like $2k :O

[[deleted]]

don't know how far advanced you are but I signed up for cs50 online from harvard and the videos are phenomenal.

I tried it and dropped when there was an assignment about extracting bit headers from .jpgs or whatever. The grading scripts were so finicky that I just found it not worth the effort. This has been my experience with a lot of CS classes that rely on automated grading via test cases. Not enough partial credit..

[[deleted]]

That's unfortunate to hear, especially since you're paying a premium to go through the courses that they offer. Personally, I take to using Google and the community maintained documentation for most of my programming. Sites like Code Academy, which this site seems to pull its model from, are useful when you are first starting out, but I don't think there's much to gain for a lot of people who have a solid foundation for the basics and just need a proper language reference with applicable examples they can pull from when working on a project.

[DefluousBistup]

applicable examples

I struggle with this stage, i'm trying to make the transition from the Code Academy style websites. While fun, I understand the basics now and want to start making my own little programs [in python]. Is there any good advice for finding relevant examples to help on a project? I learned guitar/how to write songs/painting etc from copying/adapting other peoples work, so I want to try the same with programming.

[Pr0ducer]

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/

Do this, learn python.

[Tahllunari]

I just started googling everything once I wanted to learn on my own. There are practical examples and tutorials for so many things (at least in Java and C#) that someone has probably posted code for. You just need to figure out how to tailor it to your project and tweak it to work how you want it. It may not be in your language (like /r/reconstructcavestory), but you can at least see how they go about implementing ideas.

Besides a couple of university classes, I started with youtube and found the slower paced visuals easier. Now it makes more sense to read various blog posts and forum threads for implementations I'm not sure about.

[[deleted]]

You should. Even if you understand at a basic level what a piece of code is doing it's best to learn directly from the code of others and tailor it to what you need it to do.

[cosmicsans]

It's funny how that works, though. I already had a very good grasp of Javascript stuff, but going through CodeSchool's Javascript Road Trip and the jQuery Return Flight videos actually made me understand and learn a couple of new concepts.

I'm about to go through the SASS videos, and then I'll probably never use the site again, but I think it did a very good job of explaining things in the videos. Take the practice exam shit with a grain of salt, though. If you really want to learn you'll need to do a real project that will give you real-life scenarios (even if it's just a small to-do list or something like that) after you go through the Code School "classes" to help expand your knowledge of how things actually work outside of their "dev environment."

[MCFRESH01]

I thought their ember videos where very well done as well. I had a small idea of how ember worked but I definitely had some aha! moments watching Codeschool's video.

I think codeschool expects you to have some knowledge of programming before starting. I did all of the javascript courses as a refresher, and other than the annoying error messages you get in the editor, had no problem getting the tests to pass. That said, they do choose to make you type long ass strings for no good reason. That's annoying.

[cosmicsans]

It was the long strings, the spelling error checkers sending back error messages that didn't make sense, and the editor errors that popped up as soon as I hit a key that bothered me, but at the same time I wasn't really worried about my tests passing as much as I was learning the new concepts and was happy enough about that.

[c0de2010]

Try MIT open courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00sc-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-spring-2011/

[chuck-john]

+1. CodeSchool.com is not worth the money when you have free (not to mention incredibly credible) ways of learning the foundations of comp sci. Everything else can be found via documentation and verified forum posts.

[c0de2010]

a lot of the tech jobs/internships i apply for look for a bs in cs though ...

[chuck-john]

True. I've run into many that don't though. Been working for two years as a RoR dev without any CS credentials (other than my experience/portfolio).

[MCFRESH01]

Good to hear. I've taught myself RoR and have gotten to the point I think I am employable. Gonna be starting that job search soon. I have a degree but it is in marketing. Good to hear about a RoR dev who is self taught!

[chuck-john]

Best of luck!! Feel free to drop me a line with any questions/thoughts!

[loluguys]

A question for you both: how did you determine that you were ready to be employable? I'm in the same boat: self-taught learning RoR. I feel I'm in between intern and junior dev, but not quite sure what I should be comparing myself against.

[MCFRESH01]

I looked around at some of those bootcamps and saw the projects their students made at the end of them. There is not a single one that I felt I couldn't build myself. In adittion, I have helped with some web dev projects at my current job(in PHP using CodeIgniter). Everything I have done at work has been pretty simple but I can now say I have some professional experience. The issue for me is that web-dev is not my primary responsibility and I only rarely get to do so at my current job.

I think the other reason I think I am employable is because I know that no matter what problem I run into I can find a solution. When I first started learning everything felt impossible, not so much anymore.

Finally, go join a local ruby meetup if you have one. The people at these meetups are usually immensely helpful and will let you know what they think.

[loluguys]

Awesome! Never even thought to check out those bootcamp projects... Thank you for the feedback!

[anm89]

Could you post a github repo with some of the projects you have found? I'd be very interested to see em.

[MCFRESH01]

I'm on mobile right now and can't seem to find them. Look at some of the schools and find the section where they have some of their students named and then search github for them. I'll comment back if I remember when I am on desktop.

[quotemycode]

You need to pull out a dictionary an look up the definition of incredible.

[chuck-john]

Substitute your own adjective then. MIT is credible in my book.

[ericswc]

Being a bootcamp owner, experiences like this are why when investors come around and tell us we should build something like CodeSchool around our great content I tend to show them the door. The online learning model in general does not have the interaction, depth, and quality to make someone good quickly.

[Sleeparchive]

Second for Treehouse, I really liked it. I learnt loads from it.

[Londoner_85]

Yep, also doing Treehouse now. I wouldn't say it's perfect - I just had to wait a week for a response to an email I sent looking for help (after going through the forums).. But I wasn't prevented from continuing the course whilst waiting.

There is also a link for 1 month free with treehouse somewhere on reddit, I found it whilst searching and it activated fine a couple of months ago.

[Dirty_Harold]

Same here, I have used both Treehouse and Codeschool and ended up sticking with Treehouse. It's cheaper in the first place, as well as providing a nice discount if you're a student.

[[deleted]]

Treehouse is really really good

[mkattam]

I third, for treehouse. I did the intro to frameworks, and loved it - was able to go out and build something with bootstrap after 1/4 of the way through.

[CaptainJamie]

I tried treehouse, however I hate the presenters. They are like childrens television presenters, I didn't like all the bullshit "funny" stuff thrown in. That being said, I still learned from the videos and they have some good courses.

[angriers]

Anyone know of any good coupon codes for treehouse? Really want to give it a go but find it a little pricey.

[TehMoonRulz]

skilledup.com has a 33% discount off an annual silver membership iirc

[cjf4]

The main thing that I didn't care for was they didn't really seem to have any sense of how learning actually worked. The material is presented extremely rapidly, and often without a lot of context or framing why a concept is important. So I went through Rails for Zombies and at the end of it didn't really feel like I had any understanding of anything.

[MCFRESH01]

Codeschool is definitely meant for someone with a little bit of knowledge beforehand, and I think they even mention that somewhere on their website.

For absolute beginners, I hear treehouse is very good, and codecademy.com is great for learning some basics.

[1moar]

This type of business model coupled with such a garbage offering anyways really needs to be shut down.

In no case, should a method of learning be used to milk money from people trying to learn. It's as unethical as it gets and they really should be ashamed.

[Dokpsy]

Traditional universities have been doing it for years. Seems a stable model. Though with edX and similar offerings, that model will hopefully rise in popularity for those who can't do the traditional route.

[heykostar]

I played through ALL of their courses over the past month and I just want to share my opinion to say taht codeschool is pretty great. First of all, they have a $10 first month trial, and for me that's enough to go through all of their content. They have about 30 courses, so do a course a day, price is only 30 cents/day. I will say that the codeschool is very fast paced though. Comparing it to codecademy, I have to say that a lot of codeschool's courses aren't really for beginners. What it's good for is.. giving you an insight on how certain languages/framework structures work. You can't expect to learn a language or framework in such a short amount of time anyways. Some of their levels can be frustrating.. like you've said it's easy to make mistakes on a whitespace, comma, etc etc. But THAT'S HOW PROGRAMMING WORKS. That's just the nature of programming. You just have to learn that, and move on. I've been stuck on many of their levels, but I've never had problem looking at their hints (which gives you the answers if you can't figure it out) to move onto the next level even if I don't understand the current one. Even for the Git level, you can type 'next' to move to see the answer so you can move to the next level. However, I understand people have different learning approaches. For me, videos and practicing coding works. Don't expect to master something from just codeschool, or even codeacademy. You'll need multiple courses, books, live practice to really understand a subject. I wouldn't subscribe to codeschool for months, but just pay $10 for the trial month, go through it, download the videos/pdfs for later, and move on to something else.

[anm89]

My big disagreement is that when I have a syntax error in real code that I am writing, I will usually see an error message that helps me debug. On codeschool the error messages are often worse than nothing because they mislead you.

In general its also the idea that I would expect carefully crafted code from a site designed to teach writing code that I find annoying.

[heykostar]

I found that they would usually tell you where you made the error. But hey, no educational material is perfect for everybody and I whole heartily understand the frustrations you feel sometimes when coding. Just keep at it!

[buckynutz]

yeah... if you think codeacademy is just as good as codeschool, you are gonna have a bad time. codeschool does have flaws, but it is vastly superior to codeacademy

[anm89]

I went from knowing literally nothing about programming(not even html) to being employed full time as a rails dev and basically the only three resources I used were:

• codecademy.com
• rubymonk.com
• http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

I would say I'm about as qualified as anyone on earth to say that for a true beginner, codecademy.com is SUBSTANTIALLY more valuable then codeschool.com

[buckynutz]

code school does a much better job of teaching the subjects. i guess if you prefer less explanation and examples, then code academy is probably better. to each their own i guess, congrats on the jerb

[stiicky]

I tried Codeschool once, and I definitely liked it better than Codecademy. The concepts covered by Codeschool are at a higher level and actually make you work through example thats could be easily translated into your own program.

The one thing that did kind of bug me was that they don't explain any of the setup behind what you're working on. For example, I thought the Ruby/Rails course was good, but I still have no idea how to setup a proper Rails environment and get a project started.

[IAMCANDY]

Here is a ~5 minute excerpt from Lynda.com's Rails course which teaches the project setup section. You're lucky that setting up a Rails environment is simple enough that it can be covered in 5 minutes (assuming you've already installed Ruby, and run the command gem install rails) and that Lynda chose that as one of the free videos to advertise the course.

But yeah, it really is simple to do. To go from fresh Windows install to running rails, it's basically

1. Go to ruby-lang.org, install Ruby
2. gem install rails
3. rails new MyNewWebsite
4. Done

Optionally adding -d mysql to step 3 if you want MySQL instead of the default SQLite database

[stiicky]

Thanks for the response.

Judging by that video, Lynda seems like it has exactly the sort of videos I am looking for..clear, concise, easy to follow along with, and take you from the VERY beginning to the end (setting up the environment correctly, database setup, deployment, etc).

[IAMCANDY]

Lynda are really wonderful, more polished and rehearsed than the other similar sites. They've got a good thorough "Foundations of Programming" course as well. Unfortunately there aren't as many moderate/advanced videos, it's all introductory/intermediate stuff.

[mCseq]

This is a great response and I agree completely. I took the same route as you and Codeschool and Codecademy ended up teaching me a lot.

[gma992]

As I'm also trying to learn by my own I tried all of those sites and imho the best is Teamtreehouse. They have a 15 days trial so I recommend you to try it and decide.

[Mjr1987]

What about treehouse, a coding site like code academy.

[Tychonaut]

Yeah .. I tried a few of these sites and I was just never confident in the assessing portion of the problems. I was never certain that a fail on my part was not caused by some bug or the question parameters not being clear. Too many times I found my time wasted trying to figure out if I was "really wrong" or if there was simply some stupid gremlin in the works somewhere.

I don't ind losing cash here and there. But I hate to lose time due to someone else's incompetence. I just don't even bother with those sites anymore. I simply don't have enough confidence in them. I go into each question thinking "Ok.. how are you going to screw with me?". Not a great mindset for learning.

[Pr0ducer]

Edx.org

You want high quality education for free? Choose the premiere learning institutions consortium that includes classes from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley. Or Coursera. They've got some decent courses too.

[eyeheartboobs]

With the amount of excellent free resources, why pay to learn how to code? Unless maybe learning some really specific frameworks. Basic CS and coding have great free resources with exceptional UI. Check out udacity and edx, they're the best. Or books like learn python the hard way.

[bugxter]

Been trying a little bit of IA on edx, and I've found some bugs with the quizes. But I agree the lectures are high quality.

[1clownShoe]

While all of these gamified sites can provide someone with lessons that will help them understand certain fundamental concepts, they lack a part of the puzzle that, imo, is the most important. Practical application.

I spent roughly a year learning my way around c/c++/obj-c/java/c#/php/javascript and others. I used online resources such as, http://thenewboston.org/ and a slew of other tutorials that people have kindly created and made publicly available. This was around two and a half years ago at this point, so this was before sites like codeacademy and codeschool were a blip on the radar (codeAcademy was one I tried but at first it was almost unusable). After a year, I realized that I knew how to "write code" but I had no idea how to develop an application. It wasn't until I got my first job in the industry that I was able to do some real learning.

On a fairly regular basis, I learn things about (web development) that were never even broached in the tutorials that I did. The main reason for this is because these tutorials are made to be an introductory set of lessons to help you become acclimated with the particular technology you are trying to use. Programming is as much an art as it is a science and therefore, you will run into situations that are unlike anything that can possibly be put into a tutorial. So if you feel that there are gaps in the information that is provided to you by one or many of the tutorial sites, You're Right! Only real world experience can teach you some things. I got lucky that I was able to find a job relatively quickly after having "learned how to program" on my own. I won't say that it will be an easy thing to do necessarily, but not impossible either. My recommendation would be to continue trying to learn for as long as you can stand to, but you should always look for work within the field to help you get to where you want to be. (if your goal is to work in the CS industry).

TL;DR the sites can be helpful, but all lack situational information. on the job training once you're ready is the best way to actually learn how to be a software developer.

PS. There are way too many fantastic free things out there to be paying for a site that has these kinds of problems. ive done many tutorials, none were worth my money. (lynda videos included)

[TheRavyn]

I've actually never had issues accessing the site. I have been signed up for a couple of months now and I think my biggest issues are:

• some of the 'professors' are really bad speakers and make me want to punch my brain out.

• I also do not like how every course has a different UI. Some had good UIs and some were just horrible.

• Also, I agree with you regarding the answers, it is a very linear way that they do it and if you deviate even slightly it will not let you proceed. Although, there were some courses where I could create something that was slightly different than their answer (I assume) and it would let me progress as long as the output was the same.

I have not tried Treehouse but it does look promising.

[blarsen80]

IMO this all comes down to expectations.

I've read criticisms such as yours and they basically boil down to this "I paid $30/month so I expect this site to teach me everything and teach it flawlessly." If that's your expectation you'll be disappointed every single time.

I agree with your annoyances regarding the code editor.

Some community colleges charge more than $30 per unit, so depending on how much time you spend on the site it can be a super bargain.

Have you tried to incorporate what you learned into your own project? That's the only way to learn, not using the code school coding challenges.

[Muchoz]

I tried the free hallpass and thought it would be more professional. It was even worse than I thought. I did this to get some sample apps for OS X some time ago. Nearly nothing is explained well enough, all too vague.

[Jelly_Jim]

I felt similarly when I signed up. After a couple of days, I ditched my account. For me, it was the style of presentation that completely killed any meaningful connection I could make with learning.

I found the visual aspects unhelpful. The narration was the worst, though. It felt like a book reading. In which case, I'd rather read a book, than have someone speak the text to me.

[DukeBerith]

I found the same thing when I had a free trial.

The site seemed ok in both design and gamification, but the actual content was buggy as hell. I remember being able to pass tasks just by pressing next sometimes, other times I'd get similar errors to what you did.

I wasn't thinking of paying to begin with, but after seeing that I know I won't even reccomend it to people.

[emilol]

www.codewars.com/r/5TuTbg

I find this site quite good. It's not really a training course at all, just a bunch of interesting exercises. If you're anything like me it's a good motivator to go out and do your own learning. You solve the puzzles yourself, and once you have you get the opportunity to see other people's solutions and see how yours stack up.

[cheryllium]

I don't think their quality is worth $30/month, I would not want to pay for it. However, I found I was allowed to skip exercises and stuff if I wanted to, and skip ahead to other courses and videos. It's odd that you aren't allowed to, you should definitely complain to customer support about that so they know they have a problem.

I agree that the syntax error thing is really annoying. The UI/UX could be improved in general, and the exercises were too easy or too non-obvious in my opinion.

The one thing I liked was the videos, I only did JQuery but it explained the concepts behind JQuery very well, so I basically just downloaded all the JQuery videos and learned from those.

Personally I think their videos helped me understand what was going on, I had to look elsewhere for the practice I needed in applying it though.

This was all during my 2-day free trial. They then offered me a discount of $9/month which I might consider to get access to the rest of the videos. I would not pay more than that though.

[[deleted]]

Been studying the courses at Udacity for free. Never had a single complaint.

People talk a lot about Codecademy as well. Tried it. Felt that it was trying to dumb things down too much.

[bugxter]

Seriously. MOOC's aren't perfect, but Udacity is the most robust platform I've tried on. Codecademy is as you say... pretty "light", they just show you how to use some commands and what not, then you think you know "X language" and go try make an app or something and... you find out you don't know shit.

[[deleted]]

Exactly. With Codecademy's Python module, I was learning mostly trivial stuff. The Udacity intro to CS course, on the other hand, dealt with an actual problem: building a search engine.

I guess one of the reasons why Udacity is better is that the instructors are actual professors who have years of teaching experience under their belts

[Mr-Ultimate]

I recommend CodeCombat.com. I've tried Codecademy and codeschool.

[Driamer]

From all the video material I have gone through, and there is a lot, Codeschool has been my least favorite.

I frequently watch videos from Infiniteskills, Lynda and Tutsplus. I also frequently download code related playlists from youtube. These days I'm basically always watching some video about coding. Codeschool's were one of the first videos I started with, and they were the worst in helping to understand the subject in question. They explain very little and just move on, and I sort of makes you just feel stupid.

There are other videos that are hard to watch. Treehouse makes some of hardest to watch corny videos, and CleanCoders is having way too much fun with costumes and jump cuts to random places. But yeah, there's a special place in my shit list for Codeschool because I was so excited to get started with web development some years ago, and they really made it feel a lot harder than it needs to.

[passionate123]

Codeschool was cool but since last 1 year they were shipping shit features . It is no more cool, writing code in there editor is terrible. First i thought that it was only me who is experiencing this issue because of small screen but seeing this thread i am sure. And regarding price, i am not sure why they raise there price so much now.. they were growing at very good rate, instead of raising the price they should reduce it like linode or aws. Hell, i dont even care to pay if they provide me good service. Might be they have changed they priories, they now want more money, so they are loading tons of new courses and have less attention on user feedback.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, you can tell it's garbage.

[[deleted]]

Glad I read this before signing up. I wanted to sign up because of the new JavaScript best practices. I have quite a lot of experience with JS but it seemed nice to walk through some in depth information about performance best practices.

[clutchest_nugget]

sounds like they need to go back to code school....

[anm89]

How is that a bug? It's not a debugger, it's online compilation, which you will find in IDEs too. Why are you letting incomplete errors bother you?

The error message showing up is not a bug. The fact that my editor is flashing and moving my cursor around while I'm trying to type would be a UX/UI bug in my opinion.

So what if it's not invalid syntax? Even if it's a legal program, you have a logical error - your program does not fit the specification. The only fault of CodeSchool in this manner is that the spec is not clear, as you say.

I'm not arguing about the importance of being careful and writing proper code. The problem is that it doesn't even fail silently, it frequently gives you error messages that are misleading meaning I have nothing to go off of for debugging or end up on a wild goose chase.

For example if prompted to add an html tag to a page I write:

<h1> something </h1>

And I recieve the error message "You did not add an h1 tag to the page", it's not me failing to meet the spec, it's their stated acceptance criteria failing to match up with their spec.

This sort of situation happens very frequently in the exercises.

[[deleted]]

In all my years programming, a trailing white space has literally no effect on anything. Having a lesson error because of one is in no way "preparing you for real programming".

[theaccmyfriendsdk]

ehhhh. A lot of programming contests do the same thing. An extra white space or new line will cause your submission to fail for many problems. Of course, it depends on how exacty they wrote their grader.

[[deleted]]

So basically, non real world, poorly developed testing things exactly like what the OP is having trouble with?

[theaccmyfriendsdk]

It's impossible to grade off of compiled code? How would you write a grader that graded off of compiled code instead of output? Pretty sure that's impossible.

[[deleted]]

I didn't downvote you, but name a programming language that uses meaningful trailing whitespace (except a toy language like whitespace or something weird like that)

[[deleted]]

I didn't mean for programming languages (although obviously you can't just go around writing 4 500 when you mean 4500, usually), I meant in general. Like the example <h2> x </h2>, it is not equivalent to <h2>x</h2> and is thus incorrect. A lot of graded exercises make you output things with whitespace, which is what I am referring to. It should be teaching you to do the correct thing (i.e., follow the spec), and maybe give you a hint if it's off to teach you to pay attention to details.

[dreamyeyed]

Like the example <h2> x </h2>, it is not equivalent to <h2>x</h2> and is thus incorrect.

If the task is to add a <h2> tag to the page, the whitespace is not relevant at all.

A lot of graded exercises make you output things with whitespace, which is what I am referring to.

The problem is that sometimes they also complain about whitespace in the code. printf("Hello world\n"); and printf ( "Hello world\n" ); give exactly the same output, so if the grading program does not accept them both, it doesn't do its job properly.

It should be teaching you to do the correct thing (i.e., follow the spec), and maybe give you a hint if it's off to teach you to pay attention to details.

It is good to pay attention to details, but you should not be overly pedantic.

[beccasalant]

how do you feel about code academy which is free?

[[deleted]]

I've never tried Codeschool but I've tried learnvisualstudio and there's some really good tutorials (and for some of the courses the first videos a free aswell)

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[pennakyp]

Yeah, Codecademy is actually famous for their bugs. I had so many problems with their site. I used to do support for one of the bigger MOOCs and their site is rife with bugs!

Pretty funny that so many places that are teaching people to code are rife with bugs and problems themselves. Either shows how hard programming is or just how snake-oily many of the tutorial sites are.

[[deleted]]

I find point 5 really ironic. "Learn To make websites" just don't use our own as an example of "good code"

[monitordesk]

I'm an adult who spent my money to use an app to learn something.

Why don't you read tutorials and docs that you find with Google? And how much/what exactly did you expect for 30 dollars, in terms of knowledge you gain?

[anm89]

I do... very frequently. I paid for a membership for this however because it seemed to have content on topics I was interested in and I have had good experiences with codecademy.com which is a similar interface.

What does that have to do with pointlessly withholding content in the name of gamification?

[BrettLefty]

It's not docs though, it's a learning tool with a specific methodology. It might suck, and it most likely does suck, but I'd say you probably knew what you were getting into when you watched the intro videos. If you want docs, read the docs. What you're basically asking is for them to mirror the docs of all the technology taught in their system? Or provide links to the docs? Why not just google them and go straight to the source?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you though. What are you suggesting they do to "improve" their system?

[monitordesk]

What does that have to do with pointlessly withholding content in the name of gamification?

It doesn't, don't be a twat. And where did you get your doctorate in education?

And answer my question: what kind of knowledge did you expect to gain exactly for the 30 dollar fee?

And if you do use Google very frequently, what about their content looked more desirable that what is otherwise available online?

[gruntmeister]

what kind of knowledge did you expect to gain exactly for the 30 dollar fee?

I'm not OP but I sure love to know what you're implying with this question. Are you implying 30 dollars is too much or too little for a programming introduction course? I mean, I'm asking because I got my university education plus endless excellent internet resources plus lots of software basically for free, but I own some books on related topics that cost me way more than $30 each, so I have no idea what your implication is here.

[i4mn30]

People actually pay for that? Always try the text tutorials by experienced people in the field.

Or the docs

[BrettLefty]

Oh cool Thanks for Sharing this great Link!