I've decided to make my course on complete full-stack web development free, forever! It's a massive amount of content. Please let me know what you think of the course!
I'm going through it as a tech professional who is a non-developer. I know how to code, I just don't do it professionally (and I don't know Ruby, let alone Rails).
I'm loving it. Obviously the "here are some commands" and "go find Google Chrome" made me laugh a little but I understand the audience they're for. I love how quickly we get into actually creating something, it keeps my interest when I see progress. It's been 15 minutes and I already have a Rails blog set up, yay!
Seriously, I haven't gotten that far in, but right now I'm fully believing there is a success story with your teaching method. Congrats, that's not an easy feat.
Thank you! Your words mean a lot. I agree that learning by doing is especially useful for coding and it's always great when non-developers pick up developer skills (it makes you better at what you do, and developers love you more too)!
Message me if you have any questions along the way. I'm here to help.
for you it sounds great but for someone like me I like to understand how things work under the hood. Yeah I made a blog in 15 minutes using Ruby and Rails but how did that happened under the hood? I like to fully understand things not just be told how to do it.
I guess that's why PHP being embedded in HTML allows me to see the bigger picture.
First, from what I understand, Rails has a lot of "magic". So on that note, you're probably just not going to like Rails or Rails-like frameworks in general (like Django, lots of magic). PHP or even something like Flask might be better for you. Different people like different levels of abstraction, and believe it or not you can write web pages in C. PHP was originally designed as an abstraction over C, to add a little "magic" so you didn't need to know how things worked under the hood in order to get a web page running. These days, Rails is the new magic, and PHP is the new "under the hood".
Secondly, the course does go into more detail later on (I'm on #20 of the "build a saas app" right now), where after every video that you write code, there's a video that explains why you did that and what it does to the program. It actually goes into more detail than I was expecting for a tutorial that starts off with "here's how to install Google Chrome".
I just skimmed the content, but I really appreciate that you have beginning content on how computers and the Internet work. I've seen too many people learning to code who start with 30K LOC of bootstrapped code, before they ever learn what the basic roles of a web server, browser, and an HTTP request actually are. Starting simple is a very good thing.
Based on the skimming through the titles it looks like a quite complete material.
As it looks like after completing this course people should be quite capable to build their own solutions, I would recommend you to cover the security aspect more broadly.
Perhaps cover multiple commonly known attack vectors (and how they are mitigated) and basics of the cryptology.
I would also suggest you (based on the other comment here) to not push Chrome only. It is very important for our liberty to have various actively used browsers.
I'm not sure he's suggesting everyone should only ever use Chrome, but rather heading off "it doesn't work on my system!" complaints that are common with these tutorials. He goes into painstaking detail on exactly which version of Rails, exactly which version of Ruby, and exactly what gems you need to use to make sure the learner is using the same environment as the teacher. Suggesting that everyone use the same browser goes hand in hand with this. If you're a beginner and you run into compatibility issues with your browser, you might be turned off and quit. Making sure everything is the same while you're learning is really just good practice.
I'm loving it. Obviously the "here are some commands" and "go find Google Chrome" made me laugh a little but I understand the audience they're for. I love how quickly we get into actually creating something, it keeps my interest when I see progress. It's been 15 minutes and I already have a Rails blog set up, yay!
Seriously, I haven't gotten that far in, but right now I'm fully believing there is a success story with your teaching method. Congrats, that's not an easy feat.