The Trouble with CodeSchool

I have tried several subscription sites, and I prefer this one by far. A few things make it stand out for me: Variety of content and content depth allows you to get a taste for different languages, tools, and syntaxes, while learning enough to kindle the fires of interest. Kindling and nourishing exciting concepts and ideas is what allows for real learning to occur.

Second, I much prefer the more bare bones approach to teaching than the highly polished, high production, hand-holding that defines Code School. Generally, less time is spent on useless background information which noobs will never appreciate anyways and professionals don't generally give a crap about until they decide to "buy in".

Additionally, they tend to purposely leave in (or even intentionally create) errors while presenting that give important context to the underlying logic. This is the sort of thing that always either get cleaned up in post, or is not embraced for the teaching tool it is.

The only drawback is that it operates as a sort of freelance hub, and not all of the commissioned teachers are equally eloquent OR qualified. However, my feeling is that once you get to the point where you're learning advanced patterns, you're already looking at source code and participating in a community.

Now there are to me two interesting points:

1. Is there a market for a more advanced CS education delivered outside the University system? Coursera/Udacity/EdX cover this to some extent, but even here their courses are simplified versions of the University offering.

2. Is there a way to do address the volume market in a significantly better way than Codeschool et all do? Their pedagogy is quite out-dated -- it's the old programming language as bag of syntax approach. The How to Design Programs (http://htdp.org/) approach, which I'm familiar with, is much better. I'm sure there are other initiatives.

I'm 29, I taught myself to program with no formal education and I've been doing it since I made games for my calculator in 8th grade.

However, I'm going back to school for a CS degree (I already had 90 hours of a history degree), and I constantly run into new stuff in my theory classes that would've saved me a lot of time on past projects.

Learning just the practical stuff that you need right now is fine if you just want to hack something together. But know that if you do it that way you'll have gaps in your knowledge that you didn't even know were there until they bite you in the ass.

Funny enough, we go over basic data structures (linked lists, stacks, queues, etc.) in the first week at DBC and we emphasize at every level of the curriculum that being a good programmer means being able to translate some idea you have in your head into code. We teach mainly Ruby and JavaScript, but the students know it's incidental.

I just helped four students today finish their first-week project, which is a Sudoky solver. When they see the solver I wrote solve 500 puzzles in 5 seconds they want to know how. That's the perfect time to teach them about algorithms and data structures.

I taught myself recursion, threading, bit manipulation, design patterns etc as I needed them. I knew what problems they solved at a high level and only learnt the implementation when I needed to.

For example, I only knew about where you might use the decorator pattern before I had a programming test for a job which required you to "create a plugin system". A few hours learning how to actually apply it and I was good to go.

Also if you surround yourself with people smarter than you, you always have someone to point you in the right direction.

This is why I love HN, even though my background is engineering. I get a high level understanding on marketing, design, sales, hireing, product development etc etc

Its cliché, but "learning how to learn" is whats important to me.