The Best Self-paced Courses for Learning Fullstack Development in 2024

Completing each Nanodegree will take 3-4 months, and the recommended path should take about 10 months to complete at 10 hours per week. Udacity's subscription model gives you the option to pay monthly, and only pay for what you need.

Completing this path will teach you full stack development using Python, Flask, and PostgreSQL for the backend, and HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript for the frontend. If you prefer to study full stack JavaScript, you could swap out the second nanodegree, Full Stack Developer Nanodegree, for the Full Stack JavaScript Developer Nanodegree, which covers most of the same concepts with Node, Express, PostgreSQL, and Angular.

The content consists of videos, readings, quizzes, hands-on exercises, and projects. You'll spend a lot of time practicing and developing skills, both by coding in the browser and on your own system.

The programs build upon one another, so you can take your time and make sure you understand the concepts before progressing to the next course.

Udacity's projects are the standout feature. They're based on real world situations, and are designed to test your mastery of each course's major skills. Project is graded by humans, who provide personalized feedback.

Another cool feature is Udacity’s classroom app has integrated ChatGPT, so you can get instant help on each course. Additionally, you can get 24/7 technical support from a network of mentors.

Each lesson in the course includes a hands-on practice project to synthesize the material. These are fairly meaty exercises that frequently require that you do some outside research when you get stuck.

This curriculum covers a wide range of material, including frontend vanilla JavaScript, HTML & CSS, backend JavaScript with Node and Express, Data Structures and Algorithms, SQL, React, Python and Flask, and an introduction to DevOps with Docker.

Along the way, the curriculum also covers web security, test-driven development, clean code, and other best practices that will help you prepare for professional web development.

App Academy also provides a Discord community specifically for its Open curriculum, where you can gather with other users. It’s a fairly active community, and there are occasional live streams and accountability checks. Most users in the community seem to be early in the program, but a dedicated few are progressing steadily through the material. And occasionally there are people self-organizing study groups, which we highly recommend participating in if you can.

The explanations are thorough and well-designed to progress from topic to topic. The authors also include some spaced repetition to reiterate key concepts, and hammer home best practices like logging everything to the console as you’re building.

The curriculum is structured in parts - each designed to take about a week if you put in 10-20 hours. Each section is designed to build on previous sections, and the exercises in each section add functionality to an example application.

You can also submit exercises for grading and feedback, which is incredibly valuable for learning, and required if you want to receive a certificate of completion. You can get a certificate for completing parts 0-7 (the base curriculum), and a certificate for each of the subsequent elective parts.

Each course within the path is broken up into smaller modules and lessons, so it's easy to pick up where you left off.

The learning path contains both guided projects and portfolio projects. Guided projects provide a lot of hand-holding, so they're more like step-by-step tutorials.

The 5 portfolio projects are much more rigorous, including a final capstone project that is totally open-ended. You receive basic requirements the project is supposed to meet, like creating a front end with React, server using Node and Express, and tests to ensure code integrity.

These courses are quite rigorous, just what you'd expect from Harvard. Each module contains one video lecture supplemented by detailed lecture notes and a project. You'll need the lecture notes as reference when completing the projects, along with supplemental resources from around the web as well, particularly documentation.

We absolutely love the rigor of the projects. The projects are mostly building full-featured clones of well-known websites, like a front-end for Google Search, a Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia, and an eBay-like e-commerce auction site.

Each project assignment includes specs that your deliverable needs to meet in order to receive credit. If submitting your project for credit, you’ll also need to record a 5-minute screencast demonstrating the functionality of your project.

The course is designed to fit a wide range of learners. If you're not already familiar with some of the concepts, the course starts from scratch, but you may need to spend a little extra time, as it covers a lot of ground fairly quickly.

CS50 also includes one of the most robust and active communities around an online course. There are tens of thousands of active members on the Discord, and if you have a question, you typically don't have to wait long to get a solid answer.

Each lesson primarily consists of curated tutorials from around the web, with a range of readings, videos, and documentation. It’s all relevant and well curated, but you may be a bit disappointed that you’re being passed to different resources and official documents, vs. other resources we recommend that have authored all the material. As a professional developer, you’re going to spend a lot of time reading documentation and piecing together knowledge from a variety of resources. So the structure of the Odin Project is actually great for teaching you how to understand and digest technical documents and how to learn from introductory overviews.

We really like the structure of the hands-on projects, where you receive base requirements along with some suggested extra credit features that you can add to your project to go above and beyond.

We also like that students can post their solution to a project and like other’s submissions. This is great for learning, as you can see how others solved the same problems you've tackled.

The Odin Project's maintainers also participate in the Discord community, which makes it fairly easy to get answers to your questions.