While it’s straightforward to get Hello World implemented in Python, learning the ins and outs of the programming language takes a lot of time and effort. There are so many aspects to consider when conquering a programming language like Python: syntax, built-in functions, performance. Sometimes, a language will make your life easier. Other times, it won’t. Knowing when is useful. Teaching yourself all of these things is doable, but it can be challenging to find the good stuff that will actually teach you well.
I’ve been building Boot.dev as a side-project for the last couple of years, and have recently had many new students ask the same question: “Why does your computer science curriculum require me to learn more than one programming language?” It seems that a good number of students join the platform with the opinion that they would rather “fully master a single language” than “split their efforts”. While I plan to explain this better in the app itself moving forward, I wanted to write get this blog post out to provide an in-depth explanation of why we have you learn several languages over the course of our CS program.
I needed to discover the best places to learn Python online way back in 2018. Back then, I had an Instagram account that I was trying to grow. All the social media gurus said the best way to do it was to like and comment on pictures in your niche hashtags. It took forever to do manually, and I had a background in data science using R. So I thought to myself: there has got to be a way to automate this.
With markets in a slump, many of us are concerned a recession could be right around the corner. The NASDAQ is already down 27% so far in 2022. Heck, maybe we’re already in the middle of a recession. If you are a developer, or are in the middle of learning to code, you may be justifiably wondering whether or not a recession will have an impact on your personal career.
And an answer to what you’re really asking: “are coding bootcamps worth it?” I’ll give you the quick answer right off the bat: coding bootcamps cost 13,500 on average based on the data collected by BestColleges. On the upper end of that range, coding bootcamps cost upwards of $20,000. Some of the less-expensive camps are a couple thousand dollars. It’s 2022 as I write this, so those numbers have probably increased even more in the interim.
I looked at the cost, duration, structure, and USP for each online coding bootcamp If you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, let me quickly tell you about what a coding bootcamp is before I get into the top online coding bootcamps. Basically, a coding bootcamp is an expensive and mentally intense way to shoehorn skills and knowledge into your brain at top speed, allowing you to skip past degrees at record speed.
I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time online over the course of my life, and in the last couple years I’ve been managing a Discord server for people who are learning computer science. Like all online communities, we have ban, kick, and moderation policies so that we’re not overrun with spammers and other non-contributors. However, I’m not perfect, and I have realized recently that we get a decent number of members who at first glance seemed like a spammer, but it turns out they just have no idea how to communicate online in a way that’s useful to themselves and others.
Is it a bit dramatic, perhaps, to say that the fate of the world rests on computer science and that’s why you should learn computer science? Maybe, but not by much. Computer science is “the study of computation and information, and is a subject which involves you in the very make-up of the world,” the University of York posits. Computer science is everywhere in our everyday lives. I wrote this article on a PC; you’re reading it on one, or a mobile phone.
I’ve found that almost anyone I talk to agrees with the statement: There is something wrong with education, particularly higher education. Interestingly enough, everyone also has very different ideas about what the problems are, and how we should solve them. A few popular ideas include: Pay teachers more Make university free Cancel existing student debt Online-first university A couple weeks ago I was listening to an old Indiehackers podcast where the interviewer was speaking with Austen Allred, the founder of Lambda School (now Bloom University).
tl;dr At Boot.dev we’ve launched “community insights”! Insights make it possible for our students to drop comments at the bottom of any step in our coding courses. We’ve quickly found that we have amazing students, and it’s much better for everyone if we give them tools to help each other more directly. If you’re interested in joining our self-paced, online-only computer science bootcamp, you can sign up for free here.