Codecademy

Codecademy is a great platform, and it has an even better online community. They have several career paths, such as Web Development, Full-Stack Engineer, Front-End Engineer, as well as career paths for Data Scientists. In regards to their facebook group,... Read More I find that's very easy to find a group of like-minded individuals who are also trying to reinvent themselves.

I'll start by saying I love the idea of Codecademy and the curriculum list is very extensive! However the long laundry list bugs (including the code editor not even running in Firefox or Chrome) coupled with the high price have definitely soured me on... Read More the product. The lack of support really just drives home the point that they don't care about their paying users. There's so much potential here but the lack of product QA coupled with the high price make it so that I really can't recommend this product. Try any one of the multitudes of other learn to code programs on the web, you'll probably have a much better experience than if you stuck with Codecademy.

I am so glad I found Codecademy trough a friend who recommended it. I have troubles learning but since Codecademy does everything step by step with great (and fun) explanation I can figure my way out and learn to code. Thank you so much for offering this... Read More great, informative platform!

Caveat #1: Codecademy's very clear they don't offer job support, so I just gave it three stars in lieu of N/A. At the end of the Codecademy Data Science path you're about 2% of the way to being employable, so it's not even really relevant.

Caveat #2: I'm... Read More totally on board with the basic idea of Codecademy. Getting Python set up natively is an enormous pain and really confusing — I'm decent at Python now and the Python environment is still one of the most confusing things for me. So have a place to code in a browser to get familiar before trying to jump through that hurdle is totally cool. *That said* at a certain point Codecademy gives you the option to work on some challenge projects natively, and gives you a little guidance on how to do it. The guidance they give is nowhere near sufficient—I tried for hours to get things set up in SQL and Python based on their advice but ran into so many issues that there was no support for I just decided to do it later when I had moved on from Codecademy. This means that their capstone projects simply aren't doable.

Caveat #3: In spite of not loving the Codecademy program, I like to finish things I start, so you're reading a review from someone who did the Data Science Path from start to finish, finishing about 85-90% of the material.

There are some things Codecademy does well in terms of curriculum. I thought the SQL and Python 2 lists, loops, and functions lessons were written pretty well. Beyond that, other than the occassional good module, the lessons were (#1) incredibly tedious, repeditive, and time-wasting (#2) failed to build on skills over time, opting to leave concepts behind after they'd been explained once. Once you got to a project down the line, you'd return to concepts you hadn't used for days or weeks as if you'd just learned them. This means that when you (#3) get to the challenge projects, they're simply out of reach, even with a lot of google searching and time on stack overflow. This would be the case even if the curriculum was better written, because there's sometimes a really significant gap in terms of skill level between the most challenging lessons and the easiest projects.

This leads me to the single most frustrating aspect of Codecademy, which is that they constantly point back to the forums in case users have more questions. Usually the FAQs they point to (and the forums in general when searched for a particular lesson) are 100% empty. This makes sense — why would people who have finished the path stick around to help other people muddle through basics? I can imagine an alternative world where people are somehow incentivised to do that, but it's certainly not the case currently. The CodeCademy forums were, from my experience, useless, and that fact was really incriminating given how front in center Codecademy put them in terms of posting projects and getting extra help.

I don't think the lessons that are well written are alone worth even a month's subscription to Pro — I think they might even be available for free. I've been dabbling in Dataquest a little bit for the past week, and I can absolutely recommend it over Codecademy, no hesitations, just in terms of quality of the content.

The prices are a lot less when bought from the vendor directly.

The Learning People use old content which looks worse than a stolen YouTube copy.

The sales people will tell you anything, salary expectations, completion times are all false. These courses... Read More take years and if you do them around a job they will take longer than the company gives you.

The support and CV team are staff and not professionals.

The company will take your money and after the 14 days guarantee is over they will forget you.

I have also seen this company has legal proceedings on them so may close and take your money.

I went through the web development path with a bit of prior knowledge. I found about 1/4 of the lessons to have an error about what they were teaching. Many were typos and a handful were just outdated or incorrect. I kept using their bug reporting and... Read More started talking to others. Apparently I'm not alone, the curriculum for web development is filled with holes.

Just like others below I had a subscription accidently charged and tried to cancel it on the same day of the charge. I got a quick, generic response telling me that the policy doesn't allow for any refunds at all. They'd rather have a bunch of angry customers like me (see below) than provide effective tools to learn programming.

I recently graduated with a finance degree but am looking to continue developing my coding abilities. At first glance, I thought codecademy was a great way to advance my desired skills. I tried the service for a week and it was great. At the time, I didn't... Read More have room in my busy schedule to continue using the service. Due to my work travels, I missed the deadline to cancel my subscription by less than 24 hours. Low and behold, when I contacted their customer support to ask for a reimbursement I was given a cold and harsh no. I offered many solutions to prove this human error, such as my lack of activity during the time since I was automatically charged, but nothing. What is worse, I did not even receive an email reminder that the charge was being automatically renewed. The customer service agent who was rude and unwilling to listen to my request refused to even investigate the possibility of receiving a reimbursement. I understand Terms and Agreements detail this type of information but customer service is about showing sympathy sometimes. We're all humans. We make mistakes. Our lives are busy. So why not show sympathy to a customer who genuinely enjoyed the service. I had originally planned to return this coming month but after this experience I don't have much confidence in the company as a whole.

There's a lot to love about Code Academy. There's also a lot to be desired.

Pros: Built in interface for 90% of it. You just need your browser.

Cons: Terrible instructions for obtaining and using coding software. Also, makes occasional quantum leaps and... Read More leaves the user googling to understand the current topic. Finally, the price point is awful considering the first two "cons". It's a poorly organized "class" and much more a loosely slapped together lesson plan that hopes you fill in the dots.

I purchased an intensive course. At first it was great, however, the first real project would not run on my computer, even with the completed code downloaded from the site. I spoke to 5 customer support representatives before the problem was even acknowledged.... Read More The entire process was such a time suck (3 days that I couldn't continue the course) that it made the entire experience unpleasant. On top of that, Codeacademy set up a subscription through my Paypal account without my permission. Pretty disappointed overall.