Launch School is a website that teaches a course on web development fundamentals (it is not a coding bootcamp). Instead of focusing on any particular frameworks, the focus is on topics that don’t change as quickly. I took the Ruby version of the course, but there is a separate track for people interested in Node instead of Ruby. If you complete the course, there is also a capstone program that I didn’t do, but you might be interested in.
The order of topics is roughly:
- the Ruby programming language
- object-oriented programming
- the Internet, the Internet protocol suite, HTTP, and TLS
- SQL with Postgres
- applications that interact with a database using the
pggem - HTML and CSS
- the JavaScript programming language
- how to solve programming problems in general with JavaScript
- object-oriented programming (again but with JavaScript)
- the DOM and asynchronous programming
- I didn’t complete this part because I got a job as a software developer before I finished, and this topic wasn’t too important for me or the job at the time.
Other topics diffusely throughout are unit testing and regular expressions. At points you will also program an HTTP server in Bash, a framework using Rack, and several web applications using Sinatra. If your goal is to develop web applications with Ruby on Rails, Launch School will not teach you that directly.
The course includes a lot of practice problems and exercises that I feel people studying tutorials and Udemy courses are missing. Some of them are classics (like sorting algorithms and linked lists) while others ask you to spot subtle logical errors in code snippets. A lot of the exercises lead you through creating command line games or other applications.
One thing to note is you need to pass assessments to progress to the next topic (and the lowest passing grade is like an A-). Each assessment is a live coding interview, a written assessment, or a project. At certain points in the course, you have to pass more than one of these to continue. While I never failed an assessment, they are generally not easy, and people do commonly fail them. Sometimes, I found myself as prepared as I possibly could be for an assessment with time to spare, which I used to learn about things like D3, React, and Rails.
For me, the Launch School course was a worthwhile investment. The topics covered are solid, the amount of practice is more than sufficent, and the assessments guarantee you will not pass without many of the necessary skills to work as a web developer.
There are some things I would suggest be expanded on in the course such as object-oriented design theory (and especially the design of tests). It would also be good to describe the common branching strategies used by teams and other Git topics like squashing commits and the differences between merging and rebasing. I also think it would be cool to add a project that involves implementing an object-relational mapping.
If you want to see what they’re about for yourself, check out Launch School’s open book shelf which has some short and sweet (and free) books covering topics like the Linux command line, git, HTTP, and regular expressions. My review on this course: it’s a buy.