This is review on the tutorial site, Codecademy.
About Codecademy
Codecademy is an online learning education platform that offers coding classes. Codecademy covers an unbelievable amount of different languages and a massive number of concepts and topics. It’s one of the largest educational sites in the world, with a pretty good reputation for it’s courses and curriculum.
Codecademy’s courses can be divided into two sections, Codecademy and Codecademy Pro. The courses in Codecademy are all free with several hundred hours of free content, while the ones in Codecademy Pro are paid courses.
The goal of this article is both to review Codecademy, as well as decide whether is worth signing up for the PRO membership that they offer.
Codecademy Pro
Codecademy PRO is a special subscription that Codecademy offer, which contains all the basic and free content along with all kinds of bonus material and exclusive courses. We’ll be discussing all the benefits of Codecademy PRO in this article.
One of the major benefits on Codecademy PRO is live tutoring, which many people are bound to find useful. Not everyone can learn from reading a book or through a video. Some people really benefit from having an actual person in front of them explaining the concept in real time.
As expected, buying Codecademy PRO unlocks all kinds of special exclusive content only for PRO members. This special content includes all kinds of popular courses, quizzes to test your knowledge and extra practice content to hone your skills.
Another one of Codecademy PRO’s selling points are the real life projects. Every programmer knows that the best way to practice and improve is to place yourself in a real life scenario. Codecademy aims to help you improve by giving you these projects with the scenario and data prepared.
Step by step road-maps. These road-maps are useful for people who know they want to be, but don’t know how to get there. Let’s say you want to become a Data Scientist, but which courses are you going to take? What supporting skills do you require? Where do you apply this knowledge? These road-maps will lay everything out for you, helping you take the right combination of courses you need to reach your goal.
They also offer a free 7 day trial too, so you get to test things out before actually having to pay.
Pricing
Codecademy has two different pricing options for it’s PRO membership. You can either go buy the subscription on a monthly basis for $19.99 or buy a yearly subscription at $15.99 a month. The total cost for the yearly subscription amounts to about $190.
While some people may think it’s rather expensive, I think that if you can get hundreds of courses with all the benefits listed earlier for under $200, it’s a pretty good deal. Now obviously, if you’re short on money, you should stick to just the Codecademy free courses or consider cheaper alternatives.
This pricing is obviously only for the PRO courses. The free content is free and always will be. We’ll be keeping the prices and current deals updated here, so don’t worry about outdated information.
Popular Courses
We’ve hand picked some of Codecademy’s most popular and useful courses here for you to check out at your own discretion.
Learn Python 3: This Codecademy course covers Python in it’s latest version, Python 3. As you might already know, Python is one of the most popular languages right now, and is growing rapidly. With over 25 hours of content, this courses aims to teach you all the basics and intermediate topics to become a Python programmer.
Data Science Skill Path: Codeceademy’s Data Science Skill track is a compilation of many courses that combined together, give you the qualification of Data Science. It’s can be pretty confusing for the average person, as to which courses must be taken for a Data Science. This Skill path removes those worried.
This Skill path is a total of 35 weeks, based mainly around Python and SQL. For those who don’t know, Python is a very popular language for Data Science and Machine Learning.
Learn How to Code: If you’re completely new to programming, you can start off with this course here. It doesn’t teach you in a specific language, rather it teaches you the fundamental programming concepts every programmer should have.
There are obviously so many more, but we can’t list them all here.
Reviews
Just like any other site, Codecademy has it’s fair share of negative reviews too. Whether it’s because the course content was actually lacking, or whether the issue lay in the person himself (lack of interest) there’s always some truth behind every review, no matter how biased.
For that reason we’ve gone sorted through hundreds of reviews and concluded the following.
There were a few minor complaints here and there about the courses being a little easy or a lack of practical usage. However, the number of complains was in a very low proportion, leading me to believe that overall, people are satisfied with Codecademy and it’s content.
There’s also the fact that Codecademy has so much free content, so it’s hard to criticize something that’s being given to you free of charge. In fact, a lot of the reviews actually praised the free courses on Codecademy for being informative and beginner friendly.
Another slight concern that some reviewers expressed was that Codecademy might not be suited for advanced or hard core programmers. Codecademy appears to appeal mostly to beginner or casual programmers. You can check out other alternatives to Codecademy towards the end of the article though.
Conclusion
When compared to many other similar sites, Codecademy (Pro) is a rather pricey option. If you’re money-constrained then I would recommend other cheaper alternatives instead.
The (major!) advantage here is that you can access all the free content on Codecademy. You can try them out before actually paying for any of the Pro courses. Of course, you probably can’t expect your experience with free courses to be on the same level as PRO, but it’ll help give you a basic idea of what to expect from the PRO courses.
My suggestion would be to start off using the free courses they have available. If you like their style, and you want more higher quality content, along with other features PRO offers, then you can go ahead and buy the PRO subscription.
Alternatives
TreeHouse: Team TreeHouse is another popular coding site with a slightly different style of teaching as compared to Codecademy. You may find that this style suits you better than Codecademy. It comes down to preference after all.
Datacamp: Another very popular site based mostly around Data Science and related languages like R and Python. If Data Sciences is something you’re interested in, make sure to check them out. Check out our review on Datacamp here.
This marks the end of the Codecademy Review. Any suggestions or contributions for CodersLegacy are more than welcome. Questions regarding the article content can be asked in the comments section below.
