I struggled learning to code on my own.  App Academy provided a great environment to learn how to code.   This is a very INTENSE program but working with others and having instructors to reference makes the experience all worthwhile.  I'd definitely recommend the program to those who are sure they want to become a web app developer.

App Academy is life-changing. This was by far the toughest workload I’ve ever had to endure. I constantly wondered day by day if I would survive and understand everything thrown at me. But week after week I was reminded just how much I’ve actually retained and how much I was growing into the software engineer I aimed to be. I went to a different bootcamp a year beforehand and learned a great amount of skills, but going through App Academy showed my glaring weaknesses and helped me build a proper foundation with great guidance from TA's and Instructors. I encourage anyone to apply who is passionate about coding and willing to put in the work. It is nowhere close to easy, but everyone is totally capable.

It's no understatement to say that you will literally be eating, sleeping, and coding throughout the entire journey. If you plan on attending, make sure to be mentally prepared to do nothing but study and do code with your time. The extremely fast-paced nature of the course leaves no room for laziness. You have to be at your very best every single day, and, although it will be hard, it'll ultimately make you a better programmer and person. Although the program is very rigorious, it's doable for those with the right mindset. Make sure you study hard, stay curious, and sleep well. Programming requires a lot of logical thinking and sacrificing sleep to study is going to lead to more problems than solve them. There will be many moments, where you're going to feel like you're drowning in the work, but you'll be fine because you've got amazing instructors and peers to help you along the way.

After working in the restaurant business for five years, I was skeptical about trying to make the switch into the tech industry.  However, let me tell you how my App Academy experience went! After being accepted, I was given a plethora of great material to get up to speed. REALLY STUDY THIS MATERIAL. Taking the time to go through all of it and thoroughly comprehending all of the concepts immensely helps once the cohort begins. The last few weeks leading up to the course start date they have "open house" study sessions with 1-2 App Academy instructors/TAs to help answer any questions. I suggest taking note of the things that give you trouble and having questions prepared in advance to ask the staff in person. There's also a Slack channel where everyone can help each other out. After my first official day, I was surprised by how enthusiastic the everyone was! The culture at A/a really is amazing. All of the instructors and TAs are very patient and super nice. The days are very long but since you pair up with someone new everyday time flies. Stay on top of the homework, get enough sleep, ask a lot of questions and you'll have an exceptional experience. PS: The job search curriculum afterward is where App Academy shines. Just when you thought the program couldn't get any better!

There is no exaggeration about how difficult the program is. This isn't specifically in regards to the material, but the entire program itself. Considering that <5% of applicants get accepted and still there are students that get kicked out, it isn't about how difficult the material is. Students get kicked out because they are not prepared for a bootcamp. The full-time program is rigorous, strict, and fast-paced. There is no time to catch up if you fall behind because everyday there is brand new material to become familiar with before the next day. Preparing for a bootcamp comes down to how much time and energy you are willing to completely dedicate to the program. Those that slept enough, ate well, studied hard, minimized distractions, worked on the prep material thoroughly, and remained consistently focused had a better chance at succeeding. The program is designed to teach students many skills in as short a time as possible. It is structured to expose students to new material through various methods and then solidify that knowledge with practical exercises. On top of that, the instructors are more than happy to help every student with any issue. It is clear how passionate they are about programming as well as teaching. The environment is welcoming and encouraging. I have never been taught by a more dedicated group of instructors and I have never learned alongside such hardworking and persistent classmates. Every student is there to strive for success and every instructor is there to help them do it. In the end, I was almost surprised to realize how much I actually accomplished in such a short time.

App Academy was one of the more challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. I came to App Academy looking for a change in careers. Previously i have worked in the service and construction industries, with no background in tech. With the help and guidence of App Academy, I have gone from knowing nothing about coding to feeling confident that I have the skills to thrive in this industry.

I really enjoyed how they structor their curriculum, with it being mostly pair programming with different partners every day. It gives you a chance to not only learn from the instructors but also your peers, while sharpening your teamwork skills. The TA's are great and enthusiastic to be there to help you along your journy.

The cirriculum is very fast pace and at times feels a little overwhelming. But if you ever feel like you are falling behind the TA's have office hours after class is dismissed for the day and even on weekends. So if you are willing to put in extra time they are there and willing to make sure that you fully understand the material.

I have attended 2 other full stack web development schools and App Academy is by far the best.  Their curriculum is very well structured for the beginner and the advanced students. It really doesn't matter what level you come from, App Academy is challenging but you definitely come out better for it in the end.

 

Other courses I learned how to build applications.  That is OK if I wanted to freelance or work for some small start up company.  But I have bigger dreams. I want to work for a big 4 (or 5) company and one day start my own company involving tech.  In order to do that I needed to have a deeper understanding than putting code together. Ask anyone that works for a big tech company or what makes the difference between a good programmer and a great one.  They will all tell you they understand how things work more.

 

One of the criticisms I hear is that App Academy has a good portion of their curriculum using Ruby.  I understand it is not as popular of a language as JavaScript and Python but the part I like is how they use the language to teach concepts of computer science that are extremely useful going into a big company or building your own.  Think of it this way, they trade you getting deep knowledge of software engineering for the trade off of learning a popular language. Having worked with 3 other languages and familiar with about 10, Ruby is a really really easy language to learn and why struggle with a language when you can struggle and grow with concepts and understanding of software engineering as a whole.

 

Take my advice, if you're looking for a web development bootcamp, take App Academy.  It is the best

I was a self-taught programmer, sort of flailing in my IT/tech support career. App Academy turned me into a software developer and was absolutely instrumental in getting me my first job in the industry.

The curriculum is tough. It really is like a bootcamp. You'll be stressed to the max for 12 weeks, but if you make it through you will know everything you need to start working as a developer.

Despite the daunting pace and size of the curriculum, it was actually fun to get through the course. Learning something new every day was exciting and never felt tiring. I was surprised to see how much I had absorbed and remembered when actually implementing all that we had learned in the previous few months. The assessments were probably the most stressful parts of the course, but were ultimately necessary. This is a bootcamp definitely worth attending.

They are not wrong when they say your days will be long. I recently finished the guided curriculum and it is as intense as it gets! One major concern is that the directions are not written very clearly in my opinion. There will be some out of order,  some where you have to follow sentence by sentence, or some where you have to read the entire directions. That kind of inconsistency frequently got me aggravated as I wanted to learn over be challenged in some instances. There will also be almost no time for yourself so be prepared and know what you're getting into.

That being said, not once did I ever feel unsupported by either my peers or TAs. The community is probably the most powerful tool you have at your disposal. You will never feel alone whether or not you are the most intelligent person in the room. I am enjoying my time here because at some point (and trust me I was a non believer) everything just... clicked.

If  you want to go here I suggest ramping up your work ethic and getting ready to have no life for a few months.

App academy it is by far the best place to learn programming. It is hard, but it is not impossible. It will push you. You will be breathing code 24/7. If you decide to join a/A, be ready to not do anything but code for the next couple of months

Starts with coding algorithms to introduce you to coding -- revisits the algorithms multiple times throughout the course to make sure you get them fully ingrained, and Walks you through developing multiple full-stack web-projects. 

App Academy is a success-driven program that is the most difficult career-oriented task I have ever accomplished. 
App Academy is extremely selective and applicants would benefit from brushing up on algebra, calculus, and statistics before applying. If you stay motivated and study seriously, you will succeed -- this is true for most people. 

I recommend you study the application prep material until you have every detail memorized before you apply as well.

When you get accepted, be ready to work with people all day every day while you puzzle over coding projects.

I only slept seven hours a night on weekdays because of studying and commuting. Slept 10 hours a night on the weekend. Be ready to focus on nothing but coding for the next few months. Do all of the above and you will get a job paying 60+K starting salary upon graduation.

I really thought App Academy was somewhere between okay and good, but not great, curriculum wise, BUT when I was finished with week 9, I somehow knew everything to build an amazing website with multiple features. App Academy just doesnt give you the answer, they wont make it just put the knowledge on the surface. They will DRILL it in to you and make sure the knowledge is there. I loved this course and already started recommending to friends and family. Thanks App Academy!

Prepare to dedicate most of your life over the 12 weeks soley to App Academy. Even as someone who was pretty experienced with other languages and had work experience, the curriculum was tough. There were weeks when I spent most of my free time studying or finishing up assignment.

Compared to how much I knew before starting the program, I feel much more commpetent as an engineer. I have a far better understanding of the languages and technologies. that I use on a daily basis.

Even in direct comparison to what I learned in CS in college, I learned far more practicality. Most of the theoritical and fundamental concepts were still taught, my cohorts did not miss out on much that CS grads receive.

The staff were always extremely helpful and answered most if not all the questions I had, technical or career focused. They were also very accomodating towards certain needs.

The friends that I made in the cohort are people enjoy talking about technonolgy and new developments, in stark contrast to my experience in college. Everyone seemed highly motivated to learn and succeed.

I loved my time at App Academy because it provided me with the exact experience I wanted: 3 months of immersion into web development programming. In that time, I learned the necessary tools to build a modern fullstack web application. I also learned the google ninja search skills to continue to learn on my own for the rest of my career as a web developer. 

If you're prepared to work your ass off, love programming, and want to become a web developer in only 3 months, I highly recommend App Academy. 

Be prepared to make this your #1 priority as this is an intense program that'll need you to do just that. Spending around 80 - 100 hours a week to learn, understand, and apply the material will be needed to be able to do well. You will jump from one thing to the next and you need to be able to keep up as it'll be harder when you fall behind. If you are ready to do just that, you are well on your way to attend an awesome program. 

I've previously learned coding at my university; however, this was different in the fact that everything was fast-paced and they were more practical rather than how it was in school. Well of course, this is a 12 week program, everything jumps out at you just like that. Please do not get discouraged by the fact that I said that I had a bit of coding experience, it really doesn't make a big of a difference. The majority of the people in this program haven't coded before and they've come to enjoy coding and built a passion for it. The material was intense, however, if you keep pushing, you can do it. 

The thing I like about this program is the community. You attend the same program with 30-40 other people, work with them, and build a connection. The networking community builds from that and who knows where that'll take you. You will be glad to have met your cohort-mates as this experience was well worth it.

Putting in a lot of work to learn the material and build projects take up a lot of your time, but when it comes down to it, you made something. You learned something. You were able to do something. If you are not committed to learning code or think that this program is a waste of time, then this program isn't for you. If you'd like to delve into the world of coding and know that you might have a passion for coding, then this is definitely the program for you. I highly recommend it 100%.

In just 3 months, I learned a lot of theory and practical skills. The instructions for the daily projects were quite detailed and high quality. Help is always available. The curriculum covers diverse aspects of software development and is always taught with a practical focus. 

The curriculum at App Academy is particularly rigorous. Getting behind is quite easy to do. Many times, there isn't enough time to revise previously learnt material unfortunately.

Overall though, a very important summer for my self-development.

I plan to be honest and critical, but full disclosure: I am receiving a hoodie for writing this review.  I graduated a/A last month, and next week I'll be starting as a front-end developer.

Here's what you need to know:

• the a/A curriculum is fantastic.  It covers a lot of ground quickly, so make sure this is something you're good at/enjoy before commiting.  I spent 12-14 hours a day coding while in the first 9 weeks of the program.  If you're not into that, don't sign up.
• the structure is 9 weeks of learning, followed by 3 weeks of working on projects and preparing for the job search.
• the "job search" is a 1 year commitment.  They require you to apply to 40 jobs a week, and keep doing so for at least 6 months during this time.  You can only accept offers over 60k, and it must be full-time.

What I liked best:

• The curriculum is comprehensive, and really pushes you to learn this stuff inside-out.
• My classmates were amazing, hardworking people.  Made a lot of friends while in the program.

What wasn't so good:

• The job search is 100% on you.  They have no employer network, and do absolutely nothing to connect you with employers.  You will have to find companies to apply to, apply to them, go through 3-6 rounds of interviews, and negotiate your own offer. 
• 95% of companies will immediately dismiss you because you have no experience and no CS degree.  a/A's reputation does not permiate in NY, employers usually have no clue what a/A is, and aren't interested in hiring bootcamp grads
  • That being said, the 5% that let you in the door will be impressed by your skills.  So keep your head up and keep applying and working on projects.  The offer/offers will come.

My overall experience was good.  But this is tough stuff, don't be a fool and sign up without thinking it through.  You must have resiliance, and some degree of natural talent with code to get through this process.  If you have those things, it will be the most rewarding and empowering experience of your life.

In a short period of 3 months, I've learnt a great deal of theoretical and practical knowledge. The instructions for the daily projects are very detailed and of high quality. Help is always there when you need it. The curriculum covers diverse aspects of software development and is always taught with a practical focus. By the end of week 6, students will be able to create fullstack applications from scratch.

The curriculum at App Academy isn't designed to be forgiving. Getting behind on the material is the last thing anyone would want to do. Many times, there isn't enough time to revise previously learnt material but this is understandable since there is so much to go through in such a short period of time.

Great course overall.

After college I began to become interested in learning how to code. There are a lot of free online courses out there, but it was hard for me to motivate myself to learn code on my own. I did not want to take another four years of school, so I looked into a bootcamp. I looked into a few other bootcamps, but choose App Academy because one of my friends highly recommended their program.

I pretty much started from zero knowledge about coding, and was able to finish the App Academy curriculum. Would I say I am now an expert at coding, no, but I now feel that I have a solid general understanding.

I graduated from UC Davis with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I would say that the two months of curriculum at App Academy was more difficult than any two months of my college career. During this program, you eat breathe a sleep code so be ready!

PROS:
- As tiring as it was, I enjoyed pair programming because having another perspective when tackling a problem allowed me to learn better. 
- Instructors are always willing to help when you need it, but won't be babying you throughout the curriculum.
- Curriculum is structured well and by the end of the 9-weeks, you'll be able to create a full-stack application.

CONS: 
- There are a couple solo days, meaning you don't have a pair. I think there could be a couple more because some people like myself like to solidify what I know by trying it out myself.

App Academy is a great experience with lots to learn.  The program is a long 12 week program, 13 for SF,  and has you coding and interacting with others everyday from 9 am - 6 pm. In addition to the days work, you have readings and homework to prepare you for the next day making App Academy a full-time experience. While it does take up your entire life for many weeks, the programming experience is great and you definitely learn a lot. Being in an environment with others trying to achieve the same goal allows you to bounce ideas off one another which helps facilitate problem solving, depending on who you're working with. 
Pros: 
- Working with others was by-far, one of the best experiences. Being able to talk your code out with another coding individual helped me many times.
- Rewarding coding experience
- Robust coding fundamentals. The alpha curriculum preps students with the fundamentals of basic coding
- Great Staff. The TA's provide a great experience and help when you're stuck
- Bagel Day

Cons:
- Will consume your life. Be prepared for a lifestyle change
- At points, curriculum was unclear and leads to some frustration, but having others share the experience mitigates and the staff is ready to answer
-  Towards the end of the coding curriculum, there is less staff interaction or wait times will be significantly longer. However, you have students as a resource

Overall, App Academy is a tough, but very rewarding life experience. It will consume your life, but you have others with you to share the the experience.

Pros - App Academy goes over a good amount of material at a great pace - really providing us the tools to become full stack engineers in three months. I like the amount of practice we get with critical skills like React, which gives us an edge over certain candidates that may have more theoretical/backend focus. The staff is friendly, helpful, and knowledgable. I really enjoyed the work environment as well. We were pushed and challenged to be the best we could be, but also guided and not left without help.

Cons - I wish we had more time to work on our projects, but we only have a limited amount of time to cover so many things. It can definitely feel draining at times, but that's just the nature of a bootcamp. The price tag is a bit steep, but deserving with the >99% success rate. Overall no real cons - just a fast-paced curriculum that forced us to become better.

In summary, I had a really positive experience at App Academy. I'd recommend anyone trying to get into coding to give it a shot, as long as they're willing to put in the effort.

App academy is no joke. You will spend every single day, night and day for the next 9 weeks reading new material, watching videos, doing homework and debugging, all the while drinking endless cups of coffee. You are required to check in 3 times a day (9AM, 1:30PM, and 4:00PM) or you will get a strike. 10 strikes and you're out. Overall, you will learn Ruby, SQL, Rails, JavaScript, React, and Redux. You won't get much practice on HTML/CSS, until you get to your full stacks in week 8, where you put everything together to clone a website. For the first 7 weeks, the daily routine is basically HTML/CSS in the morning, lecture until about lunch time, then pair programming the rest of the day. The last 30 minutes are spent with your "circle" discussing your day. The evenings are spent on reading and watching videos on tomorrow's material and usually accompanied with basic exercises. The readings and videos will take a decent chunk of your time, so I suggest doing them ahead of time if you can. There are 6 assessments throughout the course. They tell you almost exactly what is going to be on the assessment, they give you a practice assessment, they give you a test generator to time yourself, they give you a video of a TA going through the practice assessment. Basically you shouldn't feel lost when studying up for the assessment. All the resources are there for you. When full stacks arrive on week 8, things change. No more lectures, no more circle time, and no more readings and videos. You work on your full stack all day, helping each other out when you hit bugs, giving tips to others who are doing the same or similar websites.

Some constructive criticism. The lectures, especially toward the end of the curriculum, were particularly long, and most of it was very similar to our homework that we already completed the previous night. I honestly only found those lectures useful for asking questions, but I did not feel the need to spend 2-3 more hours on the same topic we already spent hours learning for homework. The instructions for the daily projects are outstanding, providing step-by-step instructions on what you need to do next and why, that is up until around the end of week 6. Often times there will be a bulleted-list of directions telling you to implement so-and-so, when before these bulleted-list of directions would each have their own paragraph, supplemented with code snippets and explanations. In the React projects especially, they would tell you to implement something, and a few lines later, they'd provide the exact code you should write. I don't think that is helpful to our understanding. Some TAs are older and more experienced, others are recent graduates of App Academy themselves. Some are clearly better at explaining, while some kind of just look at the solutions and tell you to write what the solutions did. I'm thankful they are all trying and willing to help, but I'd always hope for certain TAs over others when hitting that "Ask a question" button.

All in all, it was a very rewarding experience. I've met and made many new friends. Knowing that everyone else in your cohort is going through the exact same thing is reassuring, that everyone else is sleep-deprived and feeling exhausted all the time, that if you ran into a bug that someone else will most likely have also ran into the same bug, that you have others who also committed the next 9 weeks to change their life. I've learned more at App Academy and produced more projects that I am proud of than I did in 4 years in college as a Computer Science major. If you are thinking about attending App Academy, I'd definitely recommend it. Be prepared to make some great friends, and also be prepared for some feels when your new friends drop out. There's always a few that can't handle the load.

Your life will change (super cliché/corny, I know, but it’s kind of true) after finishing this program. Especially if you don't have any technical background, like myself. 

As for the prepwork that App Academy provides, the curriculum isn’t as well developed as it could be, and you’re going to run into a lot of frustration with realizing that the things you need to learn to do some of the exercises are covered in later chapters or that in the later chapters. I recommend going out of your way to look up your own documentation of the concepts introduced in the Alpha Course Curriculum. Chris Pine’s Intro to Ruby free online course helped me a lot in that regard, you can google it but I believe App Academy should have also linked you to that resource. 

The program is intense, even for people with cs degrees. People with background will definitely catch up concepts faster and some will be a review for them.  But it doesn't mean its not hard for them. As a someone without tech background, came to aA everyday including weekends to study. They are not lying about 100 hours per week of studing time. for the first 9 weeks, I've never slept more than 6 hours. 
This is my personal case, some people can study only 70~80 hours and still do super well. 

This program is NOT for everyone. You really have to be passionate to learn how to program. Even if you are, this style of learning may not be for you. I personally loved it and enjoyed every moment of it. I strongly recommend to everyone, but please take everyone's warning very seriously. This is one of the hardest coding bootcamp.