One of the biggest problems for me as a self-taught web developer is finding quality and up-to-date learning resources. In today’s review, I’ll look into a mighty Udemy course that has helped me with that, The Web Developer Bootcamp, by Colt Steele. As the name suggests, the tutorial aims to teach the process of building accessible websites and web applications.
Our score:
4.0
| PROS | CONS |
|
The course takes a hands-on approach It’s full of resources Beginners can follow the pace The instructor is engaging |
Some materials are outdated Takes a long time to complete Missing ES6 and frontend framework |
Why I Took the Course
When The Web Developer Bootcamp was released, people doubted whether the course was really worth it. Bootcamp-style courses were not yet a thing in the online learning community.
However, since its debut, the course has ranked up and received a surprising number of enrollments of 474.000+, making it the second most popular Development course on Udemy. Its new-found reputation got me curious. I just knew I needed to take part in and write a thorough review of this Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele.
In this review, I’ll see if The Web Developer Bootcamp can really help me be a better developer. I’ll also compare it with another hit course, The Complete Web Developer in 2020: Zero to Mastery by Andrei Neagoie.
Meet the Instructor – Colt Steele
Before digging into the details of the review for The Web Developer Bootcamp, let’s take a quick glimpse at the instructor, a man with quite a biography.
Colt Steele
Colt Steele is a developer and Bootcamp Instructor who’s currently running eight Udemy courses under his name. Five of these eight courses are marked Best-Sellers by Udemy. He
Having worked as a Lead Instructor, Curriculum Director, and Lead Course Developer for the company Galvanize, Colt also has quite an experience in a variety of other roles.
What I’ve Learned
With 400 lectures spread over 46.5 hours, this Bootcamp is a huge class. If you look at the course page on Udemy, you’ll see that the course content is divided into 31 sections.
However, in my review for The Web Developer Bootcamp, I’ve categorized what I’ve learned into six majors sections.
Frontend
1 HTML and CSS
HTML and CSS are the two most important things that make up a website. HTML (or Hyper Text Markup Language) describes the structure of a website while CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) decides how the HTML elements will show on screen. Throughout this section, I got to design a Pokemon table and a Tic-Tac-Toe board, which really help me understand the concepts of HTML and CSS. Another thing that captures my attention is Bootstrap, which I practiced through building an image gallery and a landing page.
2 Javascript
JavaScript is also referred to as the “Language of the Web.” Step by step, Colt takes students through JavaScript syntax, control flows like loops and conditional statements. The apps I built for this section are a simple game and an Age Calculator.
3 DOM Manipulation
The DOM (or Document Object Model) defines the logical structure of documents and the way a document is accessed and manipulated using code. The Web Developer Bootcamp goes from basic manipulation all the way to interacting with events. This is where I tackled my first real project, The Color Game. In this project, I learned to build an interactive game where players match the proper color block with any given RGB code. This is a challenging but fun first project.
Backend
4 jQuery
jQuery is a feature-rich JavaScript library that helps with DOM manipulation, event handling, and animation. The instructor starts with the pros and cons of jQuery and how to include it in projects. He also goes into how to select and manipulate DOM elements using jQuery.
5 Node.js and APIs
This course offers extensive content on Node.js and APIs. It starts out with HTTP and the backend workflow. The course goes on to introduce Node and its libraries before moving on to APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces. The concepts are reinforced through the Yahoo weather API and Open Movie Data Base Movie API.
6 YelpCamp
The tutorial finishes up with the most amazing feature I’ve seen in an online course: the YelpCamp. YelpCamp is a large and intense project that tests everything I’ve learned so far. I’m glad that Colt eases students in step by step. He covers setting up the project, taking the user through route set up, setting up the database, and data persistence.
What’s Good
The Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele is a complete game-changer for the online learning community. There are a lot of reasons for this.
1. First off, this course follows a hands-on approach.
For every topic undertaken in this course, there will be projects to help solidify the knowledge.
The strongest technical point is the capstone project, a full-stack Node.js app. This app essentially lets users perform CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) on camping info. Fusing these basic operations with a full-stack toolkit allows students to build a nice-looking app.
The instructor takes time to actually show us how to finish the project through simple tasks and exercises. You also get plenty of warm-up practice with smaller projects before entering the Yelp Camp world.
For example, before you reach the grand finale, the YelpCamp, you will:
- work with a Pokemon table and a Tic-Tac-Toe board when you learn about HTML and CSS
- build an Age Calculator app in the section on JavaScript
- practice DOM manipulation through a Color game.
2. The Web Developer Bootcamp is full of resources.
The Web Developer Bootcamp has a total of 79 articles and 85 downloadable resources. That’s a lot.
Colt also provides plenty of back-up resources, like slides and code snippets to reinforce what is taught in the lectures.
Two sections that really stand out are:
- Git and Github: This is a section about how to use version control to save all changes made to code and how to share this code with other developers on your team.
- Tackling JavaScript – The tricky stuff: A deeper dive into JavaScript that covers some of the more advanced topics of the language.
3. The course is a good fit for everyone.
When learning to program, my experienced friends often have to sacrifice learning the exciting and current technologies in favor of the “beginner-friendly” classes. On the other hand, newbies like me usually feel left out in class discussions and assignments.
With The Web Developer Bootcamp, everybody wins.
As web development is becoming more popular, the instructor has made sure that this course can be taken by anyone, no matter their level of expertise.
4. Colt Steele is very engaging in the learning process.
While videos are the cornerstone of Udemy courses, Colt pushed past the common norm simply pressing the record button as he coded. Instead, he tried to turn the course into an interactive one through lectures, slides, downloads, readings, assignments, and pictures of his dog, Rusty.
You might think about what his dog is doing in an interactive course. Well, for example, Colt instructs how to create a webpage using the information of his dog.
The appearance of the dog makes the course and the instructor feel real and personal. And, let’s face it. You got to keep the atmosphere fun.
Colt also takes a step further to make learners feel engaged by joining in the discussions. Although he isn’t that present in the forum, he did try to make an effort.
What’s Not Quite Good
Although the course has scored a lot of points in the upside section, there are stills a few things to critique.
1. For one thing, the course is quite outdated.
This course is undeniably brilliant. However, it was created back in 2015, almost five years ago, which makes it a bit outdated.
To resolve this, Colt has inserted many written notes to guide students on which parts of the videos to follow and which to keep as resources only.
The upside is that it forces you to do a lot of research on your own and you get to hone your skills once you find the answers. Having said that, I would love to see the instructor and his team renew the course materials.
2. For another, this Bootcamp is quite long.
If you look at the stats, The Web Developer Bootcamp contains 46.5 hours of video content. That means it’s going to take you about three days just to watch the videos.
But, of course, you are expected to do a lot of other things during the process. You are going to be stopping frequently throughout the course to absorb new information, set up your development environment, and practice your newly-learned skills.
Let’s not forget about the assignments and projects.
If you actually follow the course structure and complete every exercise and project, it can literally take you months to complete the Bootcamp. But, on second thoughts, this is a good point given that you only pay around $10 for the course.
My biggest pet peeve with this course is that:
3. It’s missing two important features – ES6 and frontend framework.
ES6 and frontend framework are must-haves for modern web developers. So, I had expected to study these in a web development Bootcamp. And yet, this Bootcamp by Colt Steele, which is said to be for beginners, doesn’t contain any section on ES6 or a frontend framework.
As a result, I’ve decided to include another option: The Complete Web Developer in 2020: Zero to Mastery by Andrei Neagoie.
An Alternative from Andrei Neagoie
The Web Developer Bootcamp has been around for a while. The newcomer, The Complete Web Developer in 2020: Zero to Mastery by Andrei Neagoie, though being new, includes critical features that are missing in Colt’s Bootcamp.
Not only does it contain ES6, but Andrei expands the course content all the way to ES9.
He also includes relatively newer CSS features like CSS Grid Layout. Andrei completely dismisses the notion of jQuery being a requirement for the modern web developer. No signs of this JavaScript library are found in the course.
As mentioned earlier, The Web Developer Bootcamp doesn’t feature any frontend framework. The Complete Web Developer in 2020: Zero to Mastery, on the other hand, features React and Redux. This right here makes Andrei’s Bootcamp a tough competitor.
Andrei’s capstone project has captured a lot of interests.
Andrei spends quite a large portion of the course building up to the project. The concept of this project is pretty cool. It’s a face recognition app, called SmartBrain, that implements Machine Learning.
With a few tweaks, SmartBrain could easily turn into a hightlight in the portfolio of any junior developer.
This application shows how much Andrei Neagoie is willing to fit into the modern tech world and helps students get a job in the industry.
Both instructors use Discord and teaching assistants to help with the courses.
Hands down for both Andrei Neagoie and Colt Steele.
The two instructors use Discord, a gamer community with a modern voice and text chat app. From where I’m standing, Andrei is more personally involved in his server than Colt.
However, in Colt’s Discord, Ian and Zarko, the course teaching assistants, are still pretty quick at responding to questions from students.
Either course, you’re sure to get decent assistance.
The only thing I’m against Andrei’s course is the inconsistency of the audio.
It’s quite distracting to have one video with excellent audio then the next one full of brittle sounds. Some audios are too low to make any sense.
Audio inconsistency is one of the frequent problems with Udemy courses. Normally, it’s not a deal-breaker for me. However, as the content of The Complete Web Developer in 2020: Zero to Mastery is of high quality, it’s a shame to see such a flaw in an otherwise wonderful course.
Below is the full comparison between the two Bootcamps.
Check this comparison out to see which one best suits your needs.
| The Web Developer Bootcamp | The Complete Web Developer in 2020: Zero to Mastery | |
|
| |
| Instructor | Colt Steele | Andrei Neagoie |
| Length | 46.5 hours | 34 hours |
| Enrollments | 474.000+ | 88.000+ |
| Includes | 400 lectures, 79 articles, 85 resources | 331 lectures, 119 articles, 82 resources |
| HTML/CSS JavaScript | Bootstrap 4 jQuery |
Bootstrap 4 CSS Grid, ES6 through ES9 |
| Frontend | None | React + Redux |
| Backend | Node + Express | Node + Express |
| Database | MongoDB | PostgreSQL |
| Capstone Project | SmartBrain (a face-recognition app) |
Yelp Camp (a full-stack Node app) |
Final Thoughts
The web has been around for a while now and looks like it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. At one point or another, companies will require at least one website under their name. As a result, knowing how to build a website is an incredibly useful skill to have.
The Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele will serve as a great starting point for anyone interested in learning how to build web applications.
If you’re looking for a more modern Udemy development course, do check out The Complete Web Developer in 2020: Zero to Mastery by Andrei Neagoie.
From these courses, you can move on to explore other ways of learning the magical world of the Internet until you find a method that works best.
Hope that you’ve found my review about the course The Web Developer Bootcamp on Udemy helpful.
Happy learning!