New Video Lesson at Code School: Deploying with Heroku

I'm a big fan of Code School, even though I haven't covered them much here on New Method. They have a similar mix of video lessons and in-browser coding that Treehouse has. However, Code School tends to be aimed more at intermediate web developers with a heavy focus on learning languages and advanced techniques.

Their latest release is an example of their leaning toward intermediate. It's a short video lesson on deploying a web app to Heroku, a popular web app hosting platform. I watched it. It's good. From their marketing email:

"Because of its elegant deployment environment, Heroku is the most popular hosting solution for Rails applications. In this screencast, Jay McGavren shows you how to set up a basic Rails application for deploying with Heroku. You will also learn the ideal workflow and best practices for maintaining your app on the platform."

You'll need a free Heroku account, a web app to deploy, and basic Git knowledge for this lesson to make sense.

Bad experience with online programming school LearnStreet

The "learn programming online" space is growing fast. With Treehouse, Codecademy, Code School, Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy and others, LearnStreet has some stiff competition. Let's take a look at how they stack up.

LearnStreet is pretty new. They launched in public beta in the Fall of 2012 with a million dollars in funding after some time building their idea at a startup incubator. That bodes well for them. It means they have time to build, get feedback, and tweak their product. Considering that their competition has been mostly been around for a year or more, they have a lot of ground to make up. Others were already boasting tens or hundreds of thousands of users before LearnStreet was a blip on the radar.

Cool: Treehouse uses CodePen for "Code Playground"

I'm a fan of Treehouse. They do great stuff on a regular basis. They're arguably the best place online to learn web development and their growing student body of 25,000+ aspiring web developers is proof.

Udemy explodes with "experts" teaching online

The Next Web reports that Udemy, a marketplace connecting experts with paying students, has signed on 15,000 new experts during January and February of this year. That's a lot of experts.

Although I feel like this press release devalues the term "expert", I am very intrigued at what it might mean for online education. If Udemy is able to find students for all those experts, then we'll see the tide toward online education shift even further.

Treehouse is amazing for aspiring web developers

I dislike reviews that don't tell you the verdict until the end. I won't do that. You'll get my verdict in the very beginning, every time.

Treehouse is an online technology school and it's amazing. Anytime someone asks me the best way to learn the basics of web development, I point them to Treehouse first. It's reliable, fun, incredibly high quality, and they're always adding new content.

What you can learn

With Treehouse, you can learn web development, web design, iOS programming, Android programming, and how to start a business. The "web development" category has the most content. You can learn HTML/CSS, JavaScript/jQuery, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and even Wordpress, all through tidy packages called Learning Adventures.

Project Euler: Advanced mathematical & programming challenges

Project Euler is like a drive-thru for experiencing the agony of solving hard problems. However, it's also a surprising rush when you do solve a problem because it means you have a decent grasp of both your programming language and basic mathematics.

The problems become increasingly difficult as you progress. The first problem took me about 5 minutes to solve with just a few lines of Ruby. The fourth problem took me 4 hours. And that's when I decided it was time to take a break for the day.

If you're feeling adventurous or have a little time on your hands and want to try something new, give Project Euler a try.

Cargo-Bot: a fun way to learn programming concepts on iPad

 

There are two ways to learn programming concepts: the fun way and this way. I've tried both and much prefer the fun way. Cargo-Bot is an iPad game that teaches programming concepts by solving increasingly difficult puzzles. However, unlike other puzzle games, this one forces you to think like a computer by limiting your options to only what a computer can do.

The best thing about Cargo-Bot is that it lets you learn programming concepts without the mental weight of learning a programming language. When I was first learning Ruby, Cargo-Bot really helped me understand for-loops, while-loops, recursive functions, arrays, and how to count (yes, you'll need to re-learn how to count when learning to program). And learning all that just felt like playing a (deceptively addictive) puzzle game.

I highly recommend Cargo-Bot if you have an iPad.