Code School now open to the public | Hacker News Reader

Code School now open to the public

codeschool.com

205 pointsacrum56 comments

Doesn't it seem to anyone else that there's more than a little astroturfing going on here?

Many positive commenters in this thread have 1 karma and no other posts, and this link has shown up in no less than 3 front page links as of this writing.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354776 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354830 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355091

FWIW, no "astroturfing" from me. I got the e-mail that they launched and submitted the URL, because I've been looking forward to taking a look at it (didn't get a beta invite). Haven't used it much yet, but I like the concept, and to me the execution looks promising.

I'm completely unrelated to it, however I did go through the excellent rails for zombies tutorial, and was wowed how much it got across in so little time. I bought the next rails module sight unseen as I'm sure it has at least 1/2 the high quality RFZ did.

The Envy Labs folks behind it have been highly active in the Rails/screencasting community for a while now, producing a wealth of free content. It doesn't seem in their nature to astroturf.

The site is fresh and unique in its teaching approach. I think this will get plenty of good press all by itself without them helping it along through questionable measures.

No astroturfing. I genuinely think this is an awesome product. I completed Rails for Zombies when it came out and was blown away. When I heard about Code School I asked for a beta invite and I did Rails Best Practices and similarly loved it. I wanted to blog about it ASAP.

I emailed Gregg and asked if I could have some beta invites to share with my blog readers for my post. He told me to hold off as they were just about ready to launch and didn't need anymore beta testers but that he would ping me on launch, which he did.

While we want this to be a huge success, we wouldn't stoop to astroturfing. A little extra traffic today isn't worth soiling the great reputations of the companies and people involved.

I agree that three stories on the front page seems unusual, but two have slid down now.

"An interactive online marketplace where you can learn to code directly in the browser"

Is it just me or does something seem ... off about this blurb? For whatever reason, "interactive online marketplace" just rubs me the wrong way, but I can't quite put my finger on why.

It's the word "marketplace" that sounds off to my ear - too buzzwordy, and not descriptive of what's on offer. "Environment" might sound better?

The words "interactive" and "online" are fair descriptions of the service, but essentially made redundant by the phrase "directly in the browser".

Marketplace does suggest it's an opportunity for other people to sell their goods. Perhaps it hints at participation from outside experts not a part of Envy Labs that will become more apparent in later courses? The upcoming jQuery one seems to be run by an outsider.

Still, I think we're nitpicking on their copy here.

You're right. Look for it to be changed in the next round of design revisions.

Out of curiosity, why doesn't everyone dislike 'marketplace'? A marketplace is where people sell things, CodeSchool sells things therefore it's a marketplace.

75 US$ (final price for Rails Best Practices) for 5 videos of 10-15 minutes seem a little expensive. Are the non video parts worth the money?

Try Rails for Zombies (free) to get an idea of the quality. I find it worth it.

Since you need to pass tasks before you get on to the next video, it means you really learn and pick up the skills rather than just watch a video, think you learnt something, and then move on to something new. That's not for everyone but that sort of enforced progress clearly has value for some - only you will know if that approach suits you though.

I was invited to be a part of the beta and can confirm that the quality of the RBP videos is top-notch.

To me, it's definitely worth it for people trying to pickup a new skill like programming.

I hope they pitch this to schools, particularly middle school and high school. Something like this could potentially handle the curriculum for a programming course. It would be a lot less expensive than paying someone full time to teach a course.

We need more of this.

I see "Featured Courses" on the homepage, and a "My Courses" link that requires a login, but no way to see any other courses. I take it that means the four I see are the only ones available/scheduled right now?

Yep. The HTML and jQuery courses are in post-production now and will be released soon. From there, we're shooting for at least one course per month.

Rails for Zombies was very well done, but not too long into it I found myself going straight to the end, looking at what I needed to do and then clicking through the video to find to the parts where he actually got to the guts of what it was about and how to do it.

Overall it's a neat idea and the guys at EnvyLabs are great but I couldn't see myself paying for more.

Rails for Zombies is brilliant. Very high-quality stuff, and the website design is beautiful. I can't wait to see their JS courses.

I sincerely hope they don't do a course on Website performance or page asset loading. Turn on Firebug and refresh the site, and you'll see no script/css combining, lots of un-minified js, and a total download of more than half a megabyte on the homepage. It feels slow too.

Successful entrepreneurs release and sell first, refine later.

The courses claim to teach programming, not entrepreneurship.

They're in the business of coding first, the coding of business second.

No they teach rails development. Lots of rails development is about getting something out the door. Lots of people throw money at a situation instead of more programming effort these days, as its cheaper and "works" as well in the long run for many cases.

This is especially true of apps based on stuff like Heroku.

The initial jQuery course is very introductory, but the plan is to continue ramping up that path in 2-3 further courses. I'd also like to do courses in JS techs like Backbone, Mustache, etc.

Each one of these courses takes man-months of labor input between design, prepping content, refining it, shooting video, editing, building the backend interpreter, writing exercises, and implementing the exercises.

Trust me -- I wish they could be knocked out in a few days!

Can you claim that something is on sale the moment you release it?

(A genuine question, I thought there may have been a requirement to note that something is an "introductory offer", but there are almost certainly different laws that apply to online sales.)

You can if it's a special "launch price" which will be increased after a given amount of time.

It's called introductory pricing. A groundbreaking idea.

Pricing 101...

Jack up the price then slash it.

looks great, any plans for courses on Objective C, Cocoa, iOS/Mac development?

I would pay for this. While Rails development stuff is useful, I feel like there are a _lot_ of resources out there for it on the web. This isn't so true for Mac development in particular, at least to my knowledge.

I'm thinking about doing a MacRuby course this summer. That's at least in your direction.

You are going to have a Ruby focus, then?

Most of the people involved are Ruby people, but we'll look to bring in new authors as the site grows.

Loved Rails for Zombies and I can't wait for the others to open up. The format that Envy Labs has for online learning is really just brilliant.

Tested this and learned a ton of from the Rails Best Practices course, whereas it usually takes me a while to learn how to refactor code properly using a new language or framework or even to care.

Definitely trickier than Rails for Zombies for people how have used Rails before but much more rewarding.

Looks good, but I'll wait for more refinement of the courses and website.

One thing others have mention and I hope gets attention, is more details are need for each class. Right now it's like looking at a book with just the title and back cover. Hard to see if it's for you.

Definitely worth it. Went through it a few weeks ago and learned a lot - even though I've been using Rails for years. It goes into a lot of Rails 3 best practices too, so helps to make sure you're on the right track there. Really like the approach they take too -- sometimes writing code from scratch, sometimes refactoring bad code to best practices.

Big 404 after trying to "buy" Rails for Zombies. Hopefully just the HN effect setting in. Ah, worked after a few tries.

I'd love to see computer science problems explained and solved.

For instance start with a problem like http://www.coderloop.com/puzzles/friendsfinder and then show various approaches and solutions to it.

Just a thought.

That's a cool idea. In the future we'll build the capability for bigger "projects" rather than individual exercises. Then we'd be able to solve problems like this the right way.

I haven't watched any Code School videos yet, but learning to code by video has always been my method of choice. I've been using the (awesome) videos from Lynda.com for years now and have always found them concise and helpful with really good content.

Second that. Video lessons are great, I'm a happy customer of both Lynda and Total Training. What really helped me to start learning web development is their ASP.NET lessons.

Been using Code School for a while now (beta) and absolutely love it. Just posted my thoughts on it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355091

I haven't used it, but due to some of the comments in this thread, some people should check out PeepCode.com

I like the concept a great deal. Just the sort of presentation needed for me to get fence sitters off of it.

Just registered and I'll try Rails for Zombies(never programmed Ruby/Rails before).

The design is pretty cool.

This is awesome. I've been wanting to try ruby and get better at coding in general.

First time the graphic designer in me went "WOW" after clicking an HN link.

Are there live human instructors behind this or is it just videos?

Videos with tests that check your answers.

So, no way to ask questions, then. Hm.

The course material really doesn't require it.

Try the free rails for zombies module. You can do just a bit of it to get the style.

http://railsforzombies.org/

Look for live question-answering sessions to be added soon!

That is one gorgeous site.

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