The Web Development Bootcamp by Colt Steele - Review

It has been a while since I have taken Colt Steele's The Web Development Bootcamp on Udemy. It was the first web development course I took and at the time I did not know HTML, CSS or anything about backend servers. I had experiences with Pyhton, C++ and I had watched Code Train's p5.js tutorial. My experiences with C++ and Python were mostly about Structural Analysis (I have a Bachelor's in Civil Engineering) and nothing more.

I am going to cut to the chase, I think Colt Steele did a great job with this course and I think it is a great start if you want to get into web development. It covers: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CLI, Node.js, Express, RESTful Routes and MongoDB. It has everything, but it is not in depth. If every subject were covered in depth, the course would be around 300 hours instead of 60 and it would deter new developers. There are mini projects throughout the course and a big one at the end. In the big project you create a Server-Side Rendered website with Express in the backend and deploy it to Heroku. It uses a MongoDB database and it has the functionality of creating users, logging in, logging out, creating a new post and editing it. Basically the whole CRUD package.

Colt is really good at teaching and it shows in this course. I did not have any major diffuculties with the material even though I had literally 0 experience with web development. Whenever someone asks me how they should start, I tell them about this course.

As a final note Colt has another course with other instructors called The Advanced Web Developer Bootcamp, which I did not find helpful. It tries to teach React, but does not go into it deep enough, teaches ES6 and ES7 well but one can already learn them from Youtube for free. It has some other content too but I stopped going through it after I was dissatisfied with the React part.