I don't have personal experience with bootcamps, but from what I hear they're great for getting a job quickly. They seem to have high success rates for getting a job after completion. It may be worth it if you have the money and want to go that route.

On the other hand, I started my career with self-learning and so did a close friend of mine. He recently got his first job after self-learning for about 1 year. In my opinion, he was good enough to get a first job 6 months in. However, he held off until he got to a point where he was comfortable. He's also crushing it at work and has already gotten promotions and higher responsibility.

But, he works and studies hard. His route and my recommendation were to:

1. Learn the basics of HTML and CSS from a course of your choice. He used Scrimba and did some courses from there.
2. For JavaScript, he learned the basics from Andrew Mead's course on Udemy on JavaScript. A similar course by someone else would work fine too.
3. I also recommended going through MDN. When I was learning, I was going through the relevant MDN section after the relevant part of a video course (so I was doing a video course and MDN in parallel), Instead, he went through MDN after fully finishing the previous courses, which seemed to work fine for him.

In the meantime, he also did FreeCodeCamp for practice. This was in parallel to the courses he was doing. They have exercises so you can practice. They also have projects that you can do.

After the courses and plenty of FreeCodeCamp he built a small portfolio of projects. He built a fairly good looking website with some cool parallax effects to showcase his HTML, CSS and BEM skills. He also built a simple JavaScript project showcasing his JavaScript skills. (FreeCodeCamp has similar projects.)

Then, he started applying for jobs and got one. The portfolio helped a lot. In fact, I'm pretty sure my portfolio is what landed me my first job too.

After, he continued learning topics like:

• webpack
• accessibility
• testing
• React (he only started learning this after his job, because his job didn't use React. However, it might be worth to learn the basics of this before if you want a job that uses React)
• and of course much more of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

Anyway, as with any field, it takes at least a few years to get good, so you'll have to keep learning for a while. Well, technically you could stop learning after your first job, you'll just progress slower.

It was a lot of work, but it worked out for him and me.

When I became a web developer, I went a similar route. The difference was that I did a lot of bad courses which I helped him avoid, and I learned a lot of stuff that I realised later I didn't need, at least not for a long time.

He's a front end developer. I started as a front end developer but now also work as a full-stack developer.

Hope that helps. Good luck!

Hi! There is a video on the Internet "How to become a professional in programming in 5 seconds". The video lasts really 5 seconds and there the person just says the word "code". Reading books and articles is very good, but this knowledge will come today and go tomorrow. Only practice is diligent, merciless practice. My favorite motto is "You will start to succeed after you have your hands down 5 times." I'm not sure if I've stated my point correctly in English, but I can duplicate it in Russian. The main message is that you will abandon this idea several times and if you do not give up, you will succeed. Even if you get disappointed, the main thing is to overpower yourself, do further, try to come back, and regain interest. It may work out from 1 time or from 5, but the main thing is not to deviate from the idea. despite the fact that everything will be very bad. It's unclear, There are no ideas, everyone around knows better than you, you're afraid to do it because your work will be of poor quality. Be patient and everything will work out. With love and best wishes I am)

Comment button Reply

I'd recommend building a few small projects related to the type of bootcamp you want to do before you sign up. This will give a decent idea if it's something you want to do before spending a bunch of money. You'll also get more out of a bootcamp if you have some baseline knowledge going into it.