How useful is codecademy? | Hacker News Reader

How useful is codecademy?

1 pointbasdevries3 comments

I'm wondering if codecademy is that useful, because after all, they only teach you the principles of coding and not the actual coding you would use to build product with. I.e. they only learn you how to loop, but not how to do it in a SQL/no-SQL db, and therefor, a kickstart to a little project could stay off the runway while that is where you learn the most. I would like to have your opinions on this, please add to your comments if you use(d) the service or not.

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I'm the cofounder of Codecademy, so I'm obviously a little biased. One of Codecademy's biggest strengths is definitely teaching the basic principles and beginning concepts in programming but many of our users have gone on both with Codecademy and with other resources to find jobs, create companies, or build their own side projects. A small sampling of people like that is here: codecademy.com/stories. Let us know if we can help with anything!

Thanks so much for responding, I certainly must say that with the beta track running right now you guys did an awesome job. I think that when you guys follow this path, the coding education competition will be won by codecademy. I certainly have read the stories and some of them are quite impressive. Moreover, the question is wheter or not these people would have gone the same path without codecademy. By supporting more creativity to build things like they would build them for themselfs. For instance: make people write js whitin a html sheet and link a db to it, so it becomes more clear what to use certain things for and stimulates creativity. At least that is what I reconized from our in school coding classes, and that is what I missed at the codecademy courses. But by all means: I've got a great deal of respect for what you've built so far and with the people behind you I'm sure you are taking this to the next level. Ps: good to know: I'm a 16 year old high-schooler from Amsterdam.

I feel like if you provide extra courses that are more 'real-world' like (like creating a simple web application) even more people will start to use Codeacademy. Doing so, it becomes more evident of how coding is used in real life and I think it encourages people more to start making their own stuff, because they know how to combine several languages and principles to create something more concrete.

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