| I did one and had a bad experience; I still think they are worthwhile. Much like colleges the rigor varies a lot BUT unlike colleges you're class will have a massive impact on your educatoion. I studied a lot before I went in, it is highly recommended. Some other students struggled because they did not do much prep. Some students were annoyingly inquisitive and volunteered off-topic stuff frequently, eating into class time. Have a capstone project or goal in mind when going in and try to do some pared down version for a final project(nearly all I have researched have several projects). If you (op) can, help her get familiar w/ a dev environment. Explain things in depth and assume little. I was learning the absolute basics and someone introduced me to git, rails, terminal, scaffolding and ruby over a 10min convo. Obviously, it is great to dive in, but finding out what is important and how things work is important. Show her text editors, basic command line, git ect. Resources like hacker news, stack overflow, and maybe shell into an AWS instance. I think they can be great, but they require a lot of prep, and a lot of research |