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Course Review

Full Stack Engineer Career Path

Codecademy

Here is our in-depth review of Full Stack Engineer Career Path, based on hours of rigorous testing and evaluation.

Updated: November 29, 2023

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

Fast Facts

Full Stack Engineer Career Path

Full Stack Engineer Career Path

Codecademy

By Various Authors

💰 $29 per month 🕗 6 months at 10 hours per week
👩‍💻 Videos, Readings, Assessments, Coding Challenges, Guided Projects, Solo Projects

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

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.

Before You Buy

The curriculum is light on coverage of DevOps technologies. Instead, the curriculum mainly covers DevOps philosophy. You'll want to supplement this curriculum with self-study of cloud platforms and CI/CD technologies.

Codecademy does not list estimated times for lessons and sections, so it can be difficult to anticipate how long a particular section is going to take.

By default, you can't freely navigate to sections within the curriculum. The platform forces you to complete each task in succession, and once you've completed a particular task, you can navigate freely past it. This is frustrating if you already know the material and just want to go back to a few particular topics for review or practice.

This curriculum was built using some legacy versions of technologies (e.g. Node 14, free Heroku hosting). So you'll have to find alternative solutions to hosting your applications, and may find some code start to break.

Go to Course

Other Courses to Consider to Learn Fullstack Developer

Full Stack Developer Career Track

Full Stack Developer Career Track

Udacity

By Various

💰 $249 per month 🕗 4-12 months at 10 hours per week
👩‍💻 Videos| Readings| Quizzes| Exercises| Solo Projects

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

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.

Read Our Full Review

App Academy Open

App Academy Open

App Academy

By Various Authors

💰 Free 🕗 10-12 months at 10 hours per week
👩‍💻 Videos| Readings| Coding Challenges| Quizzes| Solo Projects

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

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.

Read Our Full Review

Full Stack Open

Full Stack Open

Full Stack Open

By Various Authors

💰 Free 🕗 13 weeks at 10-20 hours per week
👩‍💻 readings| hands-on exercises| projects

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

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

Read Our Full Review

Why You Should Trust Us

Our course reviews are conducted by a team of technical professionals, course developers, and lifelong learners.

The lead of this project, Brian Green, has worked in developer education since 2009. He built the content development teams at Pluralsight and Udacity, implementing quality standards and tutorials to improve course quality and working with hundreds of authors to create courseware. Most recently, he built the product team at App Academy. As of writing, he estimates he has spent nearly a year of his life taking or reviewing online courses, on topics ranging from Web Development, Networking, Server Administration, DevOps, Cybersecurity, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.

How We Tested

Evaluation Criteria

We reviewed this course using 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, particularly for learners moving from novice level. We looked for courses with more than just videos; exercises and projects were essential.
  3. Production Quality: The course should include polished and professional course materials. In 2024, the table stakes of even an average course are professional video production, uniform sound levels and noise-free audio, and course materials that are free of typos. Videos should also be captioned and transcribed.
  4. 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.
  5. Support and Community: Learning is better together! We promote courses with thriving communities and rapid, helpful support for learners, and tend to rate courses lower if they lack community or if the community isn't valuable.

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