Flatiron School

The prep work is a great introduction into Python because it's segmented by topics, and those topics are segmented to give your brain a break. And it's nice that all the topics build upon one another. For those coming from a not-so-technical background, this prep work is great because they explain the math concepts very well. And for those coming from a math background and/or little coding background this prep work is definitely doable and maybe even easy for you! 

I would suggest that the prep work be edited a bit - towards the end I found a couple of small errors that might confuse the person taking the prep work. 

My first and only experience with coding was through a past mentorship with my company, which helped me 'get my feet wet' and left me wanting to pursue web development. I found Flatiron's online program, which was perfect for my schedule and received the Women Take Tech scholarship to join the program. I always felt pushed during the program, yet supported- but not in a 'hand holding' way. You'll definietly get pushed into the deep end a lot, which mimics real world development! 
I haven't completed the program (just have the React module left) and was lucky enough to already be starting a job in web development. The coding structure and amazing support from coaches, fellow students, and the career prep team made my experience at Flatiron wonderful and I would definitely recommend taking the leap if you're already considering. 

The bootcamp prep course is perhaps the most complete and wellrounded free online curriculum I've found in terms of the learning environment they've created. That being said, there are some gaps in their content and overall, the whole experience could be polished more for it to really shine. It is mainly self-led reading and labs. This means you can do it all on your own time, but it also means that there is limited interaction with typical "instructors".

Tools software developers use are well integrated into your learning, quietly exposing and teaching you how to use:

• Github
• Atom
• the command prompt
• Chrome's "inspect"
• Test Driven Develpoment

The community of instructors/helpers and students are well integrated into your learning environment. You can always ask questions and join in discussions with other students right from the lesson you're curently working on. You will only see questions asked on topics up to the last lesson you've completed. Anybody can also schedule study group sessions for a more structured learning space/time. With these systems in place, I've found little need to go to their Slack community for much of anything.

This curriculum is still being worked on though (perhaps slowly), so there are some things to watch out for.

Content:

• This is a bootcamp prep course geared at people who have had little experience in programming. More experienced programmers with minimal web experience may not get much but an overview of Ruby, HTML/CSS/JS and TDD.
• Complete beginners may have some troubles going through the content on their own but that's what the community integration is for. 
• There are some gaps in their content. For example, they may mention having talked about one thing but never have. It'll be up to you to look it up. They also tell you that a certain attribute is depricated so you should use a newer one, but they won't mention that it's not possible to pass future lessons using this newer one.
• Their lessons have some broken tests, incorrect information, are from a previous iteration, etc. This can be annoying and stop you in your tracks if you are a beginner. These lessons are open source though, which is awesome. That means you and other students can contribute / fix things in their lessons and start using Github in a way more often used in actual open source projects. After noticing multiple things that could be fixed however, I've slowed down making issues and PRs on them. It does not seem that they keep a very active eye on their repos or update it too often.

Support:

• Their question and answer system is overall very good and well integrated. Their helpers are very responsive your question typically resolved within a few minutes. This is only during working hours though. As I live in the middle of the Pacific ocean, questions I ask in the middle of the day typically won't get answered until the next day.
• Most helpers seem to be going through or have just completed the course as well, so their knowledge might be limited. They do have more technical people on staff, but they can be harder to get ahold of or get answers from.

Learn IDE 3:

Learn.co provides an IDE for all their lessons. You can either do it on their web IDE or download their desktop version, Learn IDE 3. These were some issues that came up with the local version. Overall though, the IDE is pretty well done, amazingly integrated with Github.. Scarily integrated with Github 

• It clobbers your ~/.atom. You'd think they'd move its settings elsewhere if they went through the trouble of making it a separate app. They say it creates a backup, but that was not the case for me. Backup your ~/.atom before installing to be safe. If you've never used Atom, this is not a concern.
• Often takes 2-3 tries to open up the lesson.
• Often times you'll have work done on a lesson when you accidentally disconnect or close the IDE. The next time you open up that lesson, your work is often lost.
• Has a different set of Git Credentials than your global config? This usually is no problem unless you have your "Keep my email address private" setting turned in Github. Not sure if they keep your credentials on-server though..
• Scarily integrated with Github. You give them access to reading, writing, and creating new repos under your name, reading and updating your user data, reading and writing SSH and GPG keys. Wow.

As a whole, if I were to recommend something to people wanting to really commit to learning programming, I would point them to something like https://github.com/ossu/computer-science instead; a list of also free, but more comprehensive and complete lectures from reputable universities. These materials of course would require a higher level of commitment than this convenient, relatively content-concentrated beginner bootcamp prep

The admissions process at Flatiron was seamless - I really enjoyed talking with both of my interviewers (the first is a simple meet and greet, the second is a technical interview). I am brand-new to coding but after following the technical track for JavaScript, I felt that I was well prepared for the technical interview. The learn.co courses are of two types - purely informational, and coding labs. I feel that the information excels at explaining the basics - if you are brand-new, like me, you do not need to worry about jumping into something that might be over your head. Everything is explained very explicitly - not just the coding methods themselves, but even the programs and files that you use to do the labs, and how they work together. The labs begin simply enough, then quickly become more challenging - Flatiron uses a TDD (Test-Driven Development) philosophy (which they will explain at length - so don't worry if you don't know what that is) that I believe perfectly sets you up to be able to understand the labs and how to be successful. There is online support that is extremely helpful if you get stuck. I have been extremely pleased with my experience with Flatiron so far. 

The enrolment/application process was smooth - the admissions team and interview instructors were helpful and friendly. I chose to do the interview and technical work in JavaScript. The Learn.co course is good enough, but perhaps could be better for someone brand new to coding like myself. The pacing for me personally was a little inconsistent, and the fact that certain lessons involve uninterupted blocks of text makes it a bit more difficult to absorb information compared to other online introductory courses (for example, Codecademy, which I had more success with). The IDE specific to the course is also a bit clunky compared to some alternatives (which in some cases make it easier to experiment with bits of code and have more 'instant' feedback), although it is helpful for getting (somewhat) familiar with Github/'IDE's (?). Overall though, a good experience, and with excellent external support. 

The experience itself is fine but would have been made far better if the Learn IDE worked properly. I use VS code and am acclimated to making things work together but this was a little sad. I understand there could be some bugs but I had to use the in browser option because they are essentially between builds and the atom build had a bunch of conflicts and issues. I would recommend everyone use either a repl.it on the side to test smaller parts of their code and to change the Learn IDE settings to in browser.

That being said, the instructors are responsive, the community is fun and generous with their time and knowledge, the incremental lessons are also quite helpful. I would also like an multi-level percentage breakdown of how much has been completed but only the course you're in provides that on the dashboard.