Review: Become a Web Developer from Scratch!

This is a review of the online course Become a Web Developer from Scratch! by Victor Bastos. This is part of our series of reviews of online UX courses.

You may also want to check out our comprehensive list of online UX courses.

Course Information

• Course Name: Become a Web Developer from Scratch!
• Author: Victor Bastos
• Hosted by: udemy
• Length: 232 lectures (approx 40 hours of video content plus resources). This course usually takes a couple of months to complete.
• Intended Audience: Anyone who wants to learn web development even if they have never programmed before.
• What You’ll Learn: The foundations of web development, including basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, XML, jSON, AJAX, and jQuery.
• Assumed Knowledge: None (aside from knowing your way around a computer). This course really is designed for absolute beginners that have had no experience with web development or coding before.
• Price at time of review: US $199

Review

My first impression of this course was wow. It is one of the most professionally put together online course that I have had the pleasure of reviewing to date. The production quality of the slides and the audio is excellent, from the introductory videos through to the live demonstrations. In good news, the quality of the information in those slides is equally as impressive. As promised, this course really is targeted at absolute beginners to web development. On that note, if you are not an absolute beginner, then you may want to skim through the first few lectures, which explain the history of the internet in some detail.

Post introduction, students are hand held through the process of downloading the necessary tools (text editors, browsers etc) required in order to complete the course, and a number of different options are suggested. By the end of the first section, course participants will be able to confidently write and run a simple webpage. The project files are downloadable, so those that are not so confident can dissect them to find out where they are going wrong.

Sporadically there are lectures (e.g bugs and PhotoShop) that don’t have any visual content, they are just a static splash screen with audio, which is a little mundane. Even a simple slide listing resources would be more useful, but that is a very small niggle.

I am really impressed with how incredibly thorough this course is. As well as coding it covers CMS use, hosting, Photoshop, free templates and a multitude of other aspects of web creation. Before I started I thought that the title was a fairly lofty one, but since completing the course I can say that it is very much appropriate.

The Presenter

According to his Udemy profile, Victor Bastos is one of the most successful instructors on the web. Starting out as a freelancer, Victor found his niche in teaching and began creating instructional videos and posting them on YouTube. It didn’t take long before he was discovered by the Udemy scouts, who encouraged him to post all his videos up on their platform, in essence creating the first version of this very course. That was back in 2012, and since then the course has been updated several times and has been translated into multiple languages. Victor is now the CEO of WebLabs – a digital content provider for e-learning platforms, and the brains behind OnClick Academy – an online academy that teaches web development in a community environment.

Victor has a great teaching style. His explanations are clear and are accompanied by easy to follow demonstrations. He dishes out little snippets of advice along the way that encourage best practices when coding. I enjoyed his teaching style and the pace at which he taught the course was spot on.

A million dollar course

I was entertained by the fact that while I was half way through this course I received an invitation from Victor to take his brand new course titled “How I Created a Million Dollar Course on Udemy”, which just so happens to be based on the success of this particular course. While I haven’t actually checked out the new course yet, I can see how this one hit that target, it is indeed a slick piece of work, for which I highly commend Victor.

Pros

• Concepts and processes are explained slowly and clearly, with step by step demonstrations;
• The slide and audio production is top notch;
• The course contains one exercise which follows through and is added to in each section; and
• I haven’t come across a more comprehensive course on the subject to date.

Cons

• It may be a little slow to start for those that know their way around the internet already and just want to learn to code;
• Some of the lecture content is strangely grouped (eg commenting lumped in with text formatting); and
• There is SO much content that this course needs to be taken over the course of several weeks (or months) to avoid brain overload.

Summary

In summary, this course rocks. If you are a UXer that has always felt insecure when it comes to your coding knowledge, put aside a few weeks over Christmas and take this course. You’ll come out feeling confident and ready to put your newly learned skills to the test.

• Content (how useful, up to date, practical, and comprehensive): 10/10
• Delivery (presentation style, pace, clarity, authority): 9/10
• Production (video quality, audio quality, editing): 9/10
• User Interface (reliable infrastructure, usable interface, convenient): 9/10
• Overall rating: 9/10

Take this course.

Become a Web Developer from Scratch! is hosted at udemy. Note: This post contains affiliate links, so if you do decide to enrol in the course, we’ll receive a percentage of the sale, to help pay the hosting bills.