Take Your Education, Online!

In my quest for knowledge, I've come across a myraid of good online resources.  In today's blog I will share with you what sites I have found to be useful - some are free and some are not.  

After struggling a bit in my pursuit of creating my idea using the Zend PHP framework, I bumped into a guy, Shay, who pointed me in the direction of Rails.  I remember clearly two sites he told me to check out:

http://railscasts.com and http://tryruby.org

Upon completing the tryruby online course I believe it suggested that I visit the site:  http://railsforzombies.org.  Both the tryruby.org and railsforzombies.org sites are products of http://codeschool.com.  Code School has both free and pay-for content.  After completing their free courses, and viewing some of the free episodes of Code TV, I signed up for a yearly membership.

Another site I ran into was https://peepcode.com/.  I liked what I saw with some of their free episodes and I signed up for a year membership.  Shortly after, Peep Code was picked up by Plural Sight and my membership was transferred at no additional cost.  This was a great deal!  I got access to everything I had previously at Peep Code, plus a ton of new great content at Plural Sight.

I've also viewed some of the free content at http://teamtreehouse.com/.  I like what I have seen so far, but have not yet signed up for their service.  They are a bit more pricey than Code School and Plural Sight.  Part of the reason I'm holding off with Treehouse is because I'm seriously considering a boot camp.

Boot Camps - There are both physical and online boot camps available.  I work full time and don't really want to travel to New York or San Francisco at this time.  So in my search of online education, I've narrowed down three that look promising - http://bloc.io, http://gotealeaf.com and http://thinkful.com.  So far bloc.io is my first choice, but I need to reach out to Tea Leaf Academy for more information.

Wrapping up, I want to share a few more resources.  Although these are not directly related to Ruby or Rails, they do fit in with expanding ones education in programming.  First, I really want to get better with Vim and you can watch free screencasts on vim over at: http://vimcasts.org/

I'm still not very comfortable around JavaScript and CoffeeScript so I like these two sites:  http://coffeescript.org and http://jsforcats.com/

Learn Something New Everyday

Last Edited by: John on December 29, 2015