App Academy

App Academy is single-handedly the best decision I have ever made in my life. I've learned more these past few months than I have the last year of self teaching. The workload is draining as they essentially have you coding from 9AM to 6PM 5 days a week. But if you put in the work and make use of the staff they have there, you should be able to get by fine. Speaking of the staff, A1. The TA's are always there to answer any questions you may have and genuinely enjoy explaining concepts to you. Also, if you ever have a question after hours the TA's are easily accessible through Slack.

12 weeks may seem like a long time, but trust me when I say it goes by fast.

You are expected to learn quite a bit about Ruby on your own before you are accepted into App Academy. Once in, you WILL be spending a lot of time learning and coding. A typical class day starts at 9am and ends at 6pm, but students will stay until 10-11 to finish the day's project or start on the next day's material. Expect this schedule for the next 4 months or so of your life.

The curriculum is constantly evolving to cater to the needs of the current job market. At the time I'm writing this, React/Redux is one of the hottest frameworks in the market, so the tail end of the curriculum is devoted to React. However, should another language/framework take over, the instruction team will configure the curriculum accordingly.

You will spend most of your day pair-programming with another student on the day's projects, switching every 15 minutes between typing and navigating (giving instructions on what to code next). The teaching assistants are available for help if the two of you get stuck on something.

The instruction team generally consists of graduates from previous cohorts, who, having gone through the same material, are constantly finding the best way to explain and present the curriculum.

The job assistance team regularly brings alums and industry insiders to discuss their experience with the program, and helps connect current students with alums at their firms. They will also help you with your communications to negotiate and maximize your earning potential, since a higher salary for you means a higher payment to them.

Background: I came from a/A from graduate school in philosophy. I'm currently in the job portion of the curriculum. 

Pros: 
The structure of the curriculum is great. I had some familiarity with Rails before, but their presentation of Rails was far clearer and intuitive from what I had gone through online. 
Pair programming is challenging, I learned a lot from it. 
The job curriculum is very helpful so far. 
The TAs are all helpful and friendly. 
Most people who attend a/A are smart and have a variety of different coding strengths which I learned from.  
Pay less up front!
Recent cohorts continue to have good job placement rates. 

Cons:
Sometimes the schedule changes on short notice. 
On the whole, it's more expensive than other bootcamps which friends who now work as software engineers have attended (Dev Bootcamp).  

Overall, I'd recommend it.

I am a natural skeptic, so I made sure to do a ton of research before attending App Academy.  After going through the program, I can safely say that App Academy is exactly how they advertise.  I learned more in 2 months than I could have hoped to learn in a year or more by myself.  The course is exactly what I needed as someone who came to tech as a former attorney, and I feel prepared to work as a full-time web developer.  I am truly glad I had the opportunity to attend and would recommend it to anyone serious about switching careers into web development.

The curriculum portion of the course is very rigorous and you end up learning a lot. Every day you spend most of your time pair programming, which promotes a great learning environment! The material is very quick and breaks only the surface, but gives you enough knowledge to read professional level code and learn on your own by the end of the program. The TAs are extremely resourceful and can help you with literally anything! They ask for feedback daily so that they can keep improving from one cohort to the next, which is really great!

The job search portion of the boot camp is jam packed with projects as well as material. When you are creating your projects from scratch, you realize the gaps in your knowledge and have to figure out how to solve them mostly on your own. This can be challenging and a little scary, but pretty reflective of what life will be like after you are finished with the academy. One of the best things about a/A is that you'll have access to all of their material forever, which can be a great resource later in life.

App Academy is different from most bootcamps because of it's rigor, however what sets it apart the most would be the pricing model.

No other bootcamp does this. Quite frankly App Academy doesn't have to either. They're a top bootcamp. Even if they asked for all the money upfront like everyone else they would get thousands of applications still. 

App Academy is invested in students getting jobs quickly.

If you want a job quickly, do App Academy. Of course there is no guarentee, but at least you know they're invested in it as much as you are.

The course is rigorous and tough but just keep the complaints and tears to yourself and get through it and you'll be in a completely different position from where you started.

App Academy makes money when its graduates get good jobs, and the course reflects that. The quality of instruction isn't bad, exactly—I would rate it slightly below average. But if you are looking for one on one support, a vibrant community feel, or a thoughtful introduction to fundamentals, you will not get it there. What you will get is an extremely focused curriculum, a no-nonsense environment that motivates people who already have some natural ability, and a lot of very good advice about your job search. App Academy is changing so much and so fast that I hesitate to speak too much about its specific practices when I attended. We didn't get much immediate help with job placement. The partners they touted didn't materialize in NYC. But I got a very good job, essentially my dream job, by following their advice almost to the letter and working my ass off. The vast majority (though not all) of the people in my cohort also got good jobs. If you are smart and self motivated and you enjoy coding enough to do it on your own time before you go, App Academy will produce results.