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Course Review
Here is our in-depth review of Fullstack JavaScript Developer Nanodegree, based on hours of rigorous testing and evaluation.
Updated: August 6, 2023
The premium option for learning Node.js for fullstack web development.
Fast Facts
Udacity
By Rachel Manning, Alyssa Hope, Andrew Wong, and Guillaume Bibeau Laviolette
This Nanodegree is comprised of four courses, each of which is designed to be completed in one month at 10 hours per week.
The first two courses in the Nanodegree (Backend Development with Node.js and Creating an API with PostgreSQL and Express) will cover the majority of the footprint you’ll need to work with Node professionally.
Each course contains a combination of videos, quizzes, hands-on exercises, and projects. You'll spend a lot of time practicing and developing skills.
One of the best features of Udacity's Nanodegree product is their projects, which are based on a real world situation. Each project is graded by humans, who provide personalized feedback. In this Nanodegree, the projects include creating an API that allows users to resize and adjust images, building an e-commerce backend for a small business, and then creating a frontend for the e-commerce site and deploying it to AWS.
This Nanodegree is one of the only offerings in our guide that covers security, testing, and deployment to AWS as core curriculum. All are topics that you should learn as a fullstack developer. Udacity's subscription offering gives you flexibility to decide after the first two courses if you want to continue or move to another solution.
There’s a third course in the program all about building the frontend with Angular. If that’s interesting to you, you can take that to supplement your learning, or skip to the fourth course, where you’ll learn about deployment to AWS.
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.
We reviewed this course using the following criteria:
