Over the weekend I gave a lot of thought about which site to use to continue learning web development. I liked Code School- I did. But I had serious questions about how good it was for me. I wondered if it was thorough enough- if there was enough content in a path that I could easily have finished in a month. I had a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer. So I did what everyone does: I googled it. It turned out that the little things that niggled at me bothered other people too. The main one being that each course was taught in a slightly different way. It was also formatted in a different way. So it felt very fragmented, and that’s not really what I was expecting. I did enjoy my week of Code School, but I’m going to leave it at that.

I spent most of the weekend banging my head against the wall for various reasons. One of them being that I feel like I need a longer course to give me more guidance over what to learn, but all of the longer courses that I could find were quite expensive. Cue rant about being unemployed. I was even looking at financing options, but I’m not in a position right now where I want to take on any debts like that [especially considering the price of some courses- even the online ones!]

Enter the Odin Project. It’s open source, free, and links to resources across the internet. It’s also pretty comprehensive. I’m just starting day three of using it today, but so far I’ve read articles from a variety of sources, watched videos, and now I’m working my way through a crash course on using the command line (which is good- it’s something I’ve always been too afraid to play around with!) So far, the Odin Project isn’t so much a course in itself, but it links together various resources from across the internet to create a course. Which I think is really smart- it frustrated me before that there were so many resources but I didn’t know which ones to use or when, so this is giving me the structure that I need.

I’d love to hear from anyone who’s currently using the Odin Project, or who’s used it in the past!