(2) Front End Developer Track (Break Into Tech + Get Hired Program) Reviews

This online course consists of videos, reading materials, beautiful hand-outs and cheat sheets, and hands-on coding, and research links. The course (aka Blueprint) is divided into three sections. The course begins wiith learning the Ruby language using the terminal. The next month brings Ruby to the web, using Sinatra, Active Record, and Postgresql db. Test-driven development is introduced, along with more Ruby gems. The apps are deployed to Heroku. In the final month students use Rails to build a test-driven, complex web app. More gems are use and organized into dev and test. Quizzes are given after each module to help solidify your knowledge. Adda's positive, querky personality make learning fun. Her encouragement gets you through the times when you feel overwhelmed or frustrated.

In addition to the above, there is an instructor with office hours each week where you can ask questions, get help, and share your code using Google Hangouts. Those are very helpful. The instructor also responds to email, but sometimes real-time dialog is what you need to explain a problem. There is also an online forum, MightyBell, where students post accomplishments or questions. This is helpful when other students are participating. 

I previously took the Web Development blueprint (see my review below), and I came back to Skillcrush for the Ruby on Rails blueprint.  I liked working with Ruby but really wasn't comfortable with it from the short course as part of my first blueprint.  So, I wanted to explore it more in depth.  This is a new blueprint that Skillcrush is doing, so they are still accepting feedback and ironing out some kinks in the curriculum.  For instance, we are in the first month of three months total, and this first month-long class was easy to understand up until the final couple of days.  We had to push our app to Sinatra, and there was very little guidance on that.  Fortunately, the TA is available to assist and will help to debug your code and sort things out.  However, I thought it was faster to ask developers on Twitter for assistance and fork my GitHub repository for quicker problem solving.  

FYI: Skillcrush does not offer job assistance, so I gave that a "1" rating.