This Week at Treehouse: Forum Search

The big news at Treehouse this week, is that the Treehouse forum added the much requested, search feature.

This was part of a larger update to the forum which included:

• Featured filter, Treehouse's answer to stick posts.


• Unanswered filter, to see threads which have 0 replies


• Badges were added next to the names of Treehouse Staff and moderators

In other news, Treehouse quietly launched a new video series Web Academy, which is in partnership with hosting provider Media Temple.

This series expands the existing Quick Tips feature on the Treehouse blog into a video series, which focuses on the hosting side of creating web sites. A common theme in the series is the topic of performance, so far there have been videos on improving performance: in your JavaScript, by using gzip compression, by using CSS sprites and using CSS & JavaScript minifying techniques.

How to use Treehouse and Codecademy together (jQuery example)

While many see Treehouse and Codecademy as competitors, I see them as the perfect compliment to one another. One is excellent for learning introductory concepts slowly with a human "teacher". The other is excellent for moving quickly through the nuts and bolts of a concept. Together, you can learn individual concepts thoroughly without having to "Google around" for more tutorials.

Let's use jQuery as an example programming language (really, it's a JavaScript library) that you can learn with both Treehouse and Codecademy.

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.

3 smart people you should follow

Every once in a while, I'll list three smart people worth following on the Internet. They will invariably relate to web development or independent learning.

Eric Weinstein works at Codecademy. His title is Content Architect. I could surmise what that means, but all I really know is that his Ruby course on Codecademy is the best I've encountered anywhere. He also has a personal site.

Ryan Carson is the founder of Treehouse. He also founded Carsonified, blogs excellently on his personal site, and founded a collection of incredibly popular conferences on web design. He's a beast.

Chris Coyier is a web developer and blogger behind CSS-Tricks. He co-founded Codepen.io, which I'm a big fan of. He also does a podcast and stuff like that.

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.