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

If you're looking to launch a career as a Fullstack Developer or round out your skills, here are the best self-paced courses and programs for every budget and learning style.

Updated: November 30, 2023


Our Top Pick

Full Stack Developer Career Track

Full Stack Developer Career Track

Udacity

By Various

πŸ’° $$$$$ ($249 / month) πŸ•— 4-12 months at 10 hours per week
πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» Videos| Readings| Quizzes| Exercises| Solo Projects

Bottom Line

The best self-paced full stack program money can buy. It's expensive, but well worth the cost for the quality of instruction and the quality of feedback on your work. The emphasis on practice exercises and real-world hands-on projects are standout features.

This Course Is Great For

  • Hands-on Learning
  • Frequent Practice
  • Graded Portfolio Projects

Udacity recommends aspiring Full Stack Developers complete three Nanodegrees: Introduction to Programming, Full Stack Developer Nanodegree, and the Data Structures and Algorithms.

Udacity's full stack developer learning path guides you from beginning to job-ready.

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.

Udacity's active learning environment is stellar.

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.


Runner Up

App Academy Open

App Academy Open

App Academy

By Various Authors

πŸ’° Free πŸ•— 10-12 months at 10 hours per week
πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» Videos| Readings| Coding Challenges| Quizzes| Solo Projects

Bottom Line

Tremendous free curriculum for learning the foundations of fullstack software development, from one of the top-rated coding bootcamps. Not as seamless an experience as our other recommendations, and lacks assessments and feedback on your work, but it's an excellent option.

This Course Is Great For

  • Methodical Practice
  • Rigorous Projects
  • Engaged Community

This course consists of readings, quizzes, exercises, some guided projects, and 4 capstone projects covering the major technologies.

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.

App Academy Open's hands-on practice projects will really test your skills.

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.

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How We Picked and Tested

Course Selection

Our initial research involved spending hours reading hundreds of reviews of various course options, and perusing forums for recommendations and user preferences. From this research, we narrowed down to a list of 12 highly-rated candidate courses.

Evaluation Criteria

We graded the candidate courses against the following criteria:

  1. Outcomes: The course needs to cover the essentials for someone to start working with Fullstack Developer in a professional capacity or on a professional-grade project. That means covering the right topics and not going beyond the scope of the course objectives.
  2. Learning Features: Real skill development happens with fingers on keys, not from passively watching. We looked for courses with more than just polished videos; exercises and projects were essential.
  3. Real World Application: A great course teaches you enough to work on a production application. We looked for examples and best practices from professional experience, not just basic examples of how something works on a toy application.
  4. Support and Community: Learning is better together! We looked for courses with thriving communities and rapid, helpful support for learners.
  5. Value for Money: Many of our recommendations are free courses. But where there's a cost, it should be justified by the quality of the experience and the outcomes.

From this thorough research and testing, we're confident this is the single best guide to Fullstack Developer courses available.


Another Great Option

Full Stack Open

Full Stack Open

Full Stack Open

By Various Authors

πŸ’° Free πŸ•— 13 weeks at 10-20 hours per week
πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» readings| hands-on exercises| projects

Bottom Line

An impressive free, text-based curriculum developed in partnership with tech companies, that offers feedback on coding exercises and certificates of completion.

This Course Is Great For

  • Novice Coders
  • Traditional Academic Style
  • Hands-on Practice

The curriculum guides you through the fundamentals of full stack web applications, starting with basic client interaction and increasing in complexity. There are in-depth readings, supplemental materials, and hands-on exercises.

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.

Fullstack Open

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.


Another Great Option

Full Stack Engineer Career Path

Full Stack Engineer Career Path

Codecademy

By Various Authors

πŸ’° $$$ ($29 / month) πŸ•— 6 months at 10 hours per week
πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» Videos| Readings| Assessments| Coding Challenges| Guided Projects| Solo Projects

Bottom Line

Solid hands-on learning option for the core concepts of fullstack development. Also a good option for supplemental practice or knowledge checks. Probably not enough to land a job as a fullstack engineer, but probably enough to start freelancing on smaller projects.

This Course Is Great For

  • Hands-on Learning
  • Novice Coders
  • Starting Quickly
  • Self-starters

Codecademy's fullstack material consists mainly of readings, in-browser coding exercises, quizzes, and step by step projects. You'll spend the majority of your time with your hands on the keyboard.

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.


Another Great Option

CS50 and CS50 Web

CS50 and CS50 Web

CS50

By David Malan and Brian Yu

πŸ’° $$$$ (Free to audit) πŸ•— 6 months at 10 hours per week
πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» Videos| Projects

Bottom Line

The gold standard of open online courses, Harvard's CS50, provides one of the best ways for programmers to learn programming as well as the basics of full stack web development. Probably not enough to land a job as a fullstack engineer, but probably enough to start freelancing on smaller projects.

This Course Is Great For

  • Beginners and Novice Programmers Alike
  • Stellar Lectures
  • Frequent Coding Challenges

Our recommendation is a two-course series from CS50. In the Intro to Computer Science course, you'll learn the essentials of programming. The second course, Web Programming with Python and JavaScript, picks up where CS50 ends and focuses on teaching you how to build full stack web applications.

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.

CS50's Web Programming with Python Course

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.


Another Great Option

The Odin Project

The Odin Project

The Odin Project

By Various

πŸ’° Free πŸ•— 10+ months at 10 hours per week
πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» Written Guides| External Guides| Solo Projects

Bottom Line

Another stellar free, self-paced bootcamp curriculum. While not quite as in-depth or comprehensive as our other recommended resources, it's still a great option to learn full stack development foundations.

This Course Is Great For

  • Learning Through Reading
  • Microlearning
  • Supplemental Materials
  • Real-world Projects

Odin Project begins with a foundations curriculum and then splits into two tracks: a full stack JavaScript curriculum, and a Ruby & JavaScript curriculum. Both are excellent and proven curricula, and the platform includes resources to help you choose.

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.

The Odin Project

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.

Key Skills to Learn

As a fullstack developer, you'll need skills that span the entire scope of a website's functionality. You'll need to understand and influence how data moves from the server to the user, and vice versa.

And you'll also need to understand the basics of the following topics:

Roadmap.sh, has an incredibly helpful step-by-step skill tree. Their Fullstack Developer Roadmap learning guide is a helpful reference for up-to-date skills, and the order to learn them in. However, don't use their linked learning resources. Their suggested learning resources are frequently low quality YouTube videos or articles.

There are also some skills you'll need for the job that can't be learned from a book or a course.

The best way to learn these skills is by doing - dive into professional software engineering as soon as possible.

Companies prefer to hire people who are currently working. Whether right or wrong, gaps in a resume are question marks for recruiters and hiring managers. You can combat this by becoming entrepreneurial - contributing to open source projects, finding local clients to build solutions for, or taking an unpaid internship.

The benefit of any of these is that you're adding real work to your resume. School projects are great, but there's no substitute for real applications that have real users.

Another great way to learn these soft skills is to participate in hackathons.

There are some additional skills you'll need specifically for the job search.

That will be the subject of a future post.


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