The bar for someone starting out in the web industry is <i>insanely</i> high. Learning HTML, CSS, JS and a back-end language, plus database design and enough logic to design a sensible app is a huge amount of work. I have every respect for someone coming to web dev now. I think myself very fortunate to have been a part of it for the past 15 years, if only because I've been able to learn it all over a sensible timeframe.
All true beginners need to just start with PHP and FTP. Just like 15 years ago. It's still the most popular web language for a reason. It's dead simple and works well with MySQL. That's your stack if you're a beginner. Don't even worry about frameworks or even JS until you have a general sense of above. You want HTML and CSS too. Once you've built a couple moderately complex web apps, you're going to get frustrated with a lack of structure and organization withing the file system or codebase. That's when you will find a framework helpful.<p>Google everything and learn how to view source when you are curious how another site is doing something. Sometimes it will be difficult to follow. Sometimes it's like a rabbit hole, but it gets easier to read and trace as your overall understanding improves.
I like these "learn to code" websites, it helps to get new people familiar with the topic. But do we really have a need for so many of them? When I learned web development I googled "<technology name here> tutorial" and it was enough 99% of the time. This plus knowing the mozilla website for reference + stackoverflow covers 99% of what I ever wanted to learn regarding web standards. SQL perhaps is something that needs a bit more structured learning, but still any "sql tutorial" search will get you probably a good foundation of SQL.<p>Is there a real shortage of web developers out there? I'm not so sure. Perhaps there is a shortage of GOOD web developers out there. And I doubt that a good future web developer will learn better from a dedicated course rather than reading the rails tutorial / or watch rails casts on their own.<p>I mean, learning to learn and finding information by yourself (for me as a hiring manager) is much more important than what you currently know. I'm interested in what you could potentially do, not what you already did.<p>And if you know what you already know by researching on your own and building your own curriculum then I might be a bit more impressed (although probably I shouldn't be) - just because this is how I learned web development. By building things, and Googling things. By stackoverflow, MDN, and yes also w3schools. By reading the HTML spec, by reading ECMAScript language specification, by taking academic RDBMS theory course as part of my undergrad degree. I might be completely wrong, but I would need a lot of good faith to believe that with an online self contained crash course someone is able to become a fully qualified web developer without doing some leg work.<p>In other words a really good web development course in my opinion is a bad one. It makes it too easy on a new developer, making them think that all the information will be available for them and every task is broken down into small edible pieces. I want people to know what it is to be challenged with a question they don't know and research.
Creator of Bento (<a href="http://www.bentobox.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bentobox.io/</a>) here - I'm really happy to see more sites using free resources around the web to build curriculums. There's a huge wealth of free information out there and I find it strange that so many web development resources charge full-steam ahead with original content.<p>That being said, I think there's something to exploring those resources on your own. The principal problem I've seen with teaching people to code, especially when confronted with a set track, is that learners start rigorously, taper off, and never finish. I'm curious what The Odin Project's approach to this issue is.
As someone who always dabbles in the learn to code space, I wonder if more camps, websites for learning to code can be build on this <i>curriculum</i>, which is a tough part of dabbling in education.