Tag: Code School

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Courses for Summer Learning

learning new things

Two courses that have recently been made available (though I haven’t yet had the opportunity to take) at Code School are Powering Up With React (for React) and an HTML/CSS class called The Elements of Web Design.

Summertime – which is rapidly approaching – is a good time to commit to spending time picking up new skills and refreshing old ones. I have little experience with React, so this presents an excellent opportunity to see what capabilities are made available there.

learning new things

Whether you choose to take the above courses, or look elsewhere for learning, commit to spending a little time each day studying to pick up new skills – it may not sound like much effort to spend toward a large task, but the results could surprise you!

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Learning Enough to be Dangerous – Go From Being a Novice to an Advanced Developer

current courses at Learn Enough to be Dangerous

While I think the venerable Ruby on Rails Tutorial is still the best way to learn Rails, jumping into this tutorial can be challenging for those who are new to programming.

With the fourth and latest beta of Rails 5 being released this past week, it is appropriate that Michael Hartl, the creator of the Rails Tutorial, has devised yet another tool to help new and experienced developers learn enough to make the most of it.

Appropriately, the title of this site is “Learn Enough to Be Dangerous”.

current courses at Learn Enough to be Dangerous

As of the end of April 2016, only three “Learn Enough” courses are available: Command Line, Text Editor, and Git. However, future courses including HTML, CSS & Layout, JavaScript, Ruby, Sinatra, and the Ruby on Rails Tutorial for Rails 5 are scheduled to be added.

The cost is $29 per month, the same as Code School (if you subscribe on a per-month basis to CS). Unlike CS, there is not yet a discounted yearly rate.

Since I’m excited to see the new Rails Tutorial as soon as it’s released, I’ve decided to sign up. Were it not for the access to this mammoth resource, I don’t know that I would pay this price – but considering that the Rails Tutorial with screencasts generally costs about $150 by itself, it seems like a reasonable deal. At any rate, I’ve come to expect only the highest quality learning materials from Dr. Hartl, so I am definitely looking forward to the upcoming classes.

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If You’ve Ever Wanted to Learn Regular Expressions…

regex

…Code School has a new class for that! I’d like to say at this point that I don’t now, nor have I ever, had any financial ties to Code School. I say that because I know I’ve done a fair amount of free advertising here for them. It’s only because their online classes are the best I’ve seen yet.

Regular Expressions, a.k.a. “regex”, is one of those subjects about which every developer should have at least a rudimentary understanding. There are plenty of books (such as Mastering Regular Expressions from O’Reilly) and websites (like RegExr) that teach the concepts and how to build them.

However, for someone that has never used them before, Code School’s Breaking the Ice With Regular Expressions is a great introduction that can be completed in a matter of hours.