App Academy

Pros:

Curriculum is well designed at of the appropriate depth and pace
Fun projects to drive concepts home and learn more deeply

Cons:

Instructors are often more concerned with chatting among themselves than helping students
Since the curriculum is constantly... Read More evolving, many exercises are described poorly leading to confusion among students
Job placement help is almost non-existent. Many text resources available with general advice, but few connections to actual employers. A basic resume format is suggested and a half-assed resume review is given to each student. Contrast to Hack Reactor where the students resumes were very polished and even included a mini-portfolio. At our hiring day there were maybe 4 companies present. Again contrast that with the Hack Reactor hiring day I went to to try and recruit students for my current job where there were over a dozen employers actively recruiting.
Student to teacher ratio is 8-10 to one, but at any given time at least one of the teachers is extremely new or is checked out because they're actively trying to find work elsewhere, or they're busy chatting about bullshit together.

On the whole the program is a good fit for people who don't have the discipline to work through these tutorials and exercises in a timely fashion on their own.

This is a response to AlanS.

I took the course back in July 2013 (looks like this is the second review coming from this cohort) and as far as I'm aware, my classmates and I all received our deposits back at the end of the course as agreed upon. If you... Read More don't mind me asking, have you personally taken the course? I had an great experience at AA - I learned more in just the first month than I had on my own in a year, and I had no prior programming experience other than dabbling with online tutorials. I can confidently say that attending AA has changed my life. And I can't speak for the present, but during my class, the two lead instructors were not former students.

In response to your claim that they hire on the majority of the graduates to boost placement - I can attest that this is untrue. In my cohort, the top performing student was offered a teaching assistant position, while everyone else (including myself) participated in the standard job search. I graduated in the bottom half of my class, but I did land a job I was happy with after a 2-month search. Granted, it was not an easy process, and there were many rejections along the way, but what do you expect?

Not trying to be confrontational here, but from your post it sounds like you have not done your research. This program has done a lot for me personally so I feel obligated to get the facts out. I am happy to share more details about my experience; if anyone is interested just send me a message.

I'm very happy I decided to attend AA. It's not perfect, but it does have lots going for it in comparison to other dev bootcamps.

I think programming camps share many similar attributes - for instance, almost all of them learn in pairs, teach Rails, have... Read More very experienced programmers teaching, etc. I'll focus comments on what I differs from the norm in AA. Most of these differences are observed second-hand, through interviewing candidates from other bootcamps for the place I work now.

Pros
AA spends time developing algorithmic thinking. We started off barely knowing enough Ruby to run nested for loops to solve 'Fizz Buzz'. In the next 5 days we implemented a lot of things like binary search and quick sort. At the end of the first week, we built Tic Tac Toe allowing human players to play through the terminal against an unbeatable AI in 8 hours (that was nuts!). A few weeks later we took 5 days to learn all the same things in Javascript. Many of the junior programmers I've interviewed from other camps knew a lot of ways to do things with Rails, but didn't know how to script well enough in plain old Ruby/JS.
AA taught object-oriented and social programming. Our code was constantly evaluated for object-oriented thinking, clarity in choice of variable and function names, and accessibility to other programmers. Really handy now when I'm working with 6 other engineers!
AA taught away the magic. AA's instructors taught this super well - nothing is magical. In the course we did things like rebuild Active Record through meta programming, recreate the basics of Backbone.js using plain Javascript, implement our own sessions/login before using Devise/Sorcery, read server logs to detect and get rid of N+1 queries, and other things that dig deeper into frameworks that many take for granted.
They know what companies are looking for. I was fortunate enough to get 5 offers in 4 weeks of searching after AA. They really prepared me for the job search.
Cons
AA's curriculum covers less overall material. I think the course was a little too light on coverage of CSS. We also didn't cover some classic Rails patterns, like making forms work through AJAX with Rails' forms using remote: true ( we did cover how to AJAXify through plain old JS, obviously). Finally, I wish we had spent more time learning to code through TDD. It's a tradeoff for focusing more deeply.
AA is extremely fast-paced. You have to work hard to keep up. Definitely reminded me of 'drinking from the firehose' in my MIT days.

Your brain will hurt a lot. You will stress over keeping up and doing the homework after coding for 10 hours straight. But, in the end, it's all worth it.

Don't hesitate in contacting them. Kush and Ned are super nice :)

This is a personal story. 

I graduated from the July 13' cohort. I was attracted to AA (App Academy)because I liked their pay later model. If they were willing to bet on me than I felt comfortable betting on them. I was able to find a job within two months... Read More of graduation and I'm still working there now (I'm loving it!). The bet paid off.

AA was the most intense experience I've ever had. I came in with limited RoR/JS knowledge and I learned a ton over the course of the program. I personally liked the fact that several students had more experience than I did. Although at times discouraging, it ultimately motivated me to push hard; I was determined to not fall behind. It blew my mind that by the end of the ninth week I could build a web-app front-to-back. For real.

Not everyone makes it though. I've personally been told there have been scenarios where students were refunded their deposit in unfortunate scenarios. Ned and the staff give more attention to the people who seem to need it. It's pretty clear they want everyone to succeed, it seems genuine too, regardless of their financial incentives.

It amazes me how after the program I am able to have high-bandwidth conversations with experienced engineers. Although we learned Rails, I'm currently writing a web-app for work in Flask (Python micro-framework). Picking it up was chill because I understood fundamental web and MVC concepts. More importantly, I learned "how to learn." The skills you gain from AA go beyond Rails/JS, you gain a skill-set to become a real programmer.

AA was an experience I will never forget. I worked my ass off, met a lot of motivated people, and got my dream job working as a professional programmer. Best luck to anyone considering the program or going through it right now -- just remember to get enough sleep!