
The Odin Project – Learn Web Development for Free - gkop
https://www.theodinproject.com
======
vosper
I question starting people on Ruby for web development. It was big and
popular, but I feel that the popularity is fading (has faded?) for new
projects, and there's a lot of magic in that language, too.

Anyone starting web development now would do well to stick with Javascript.
No, it's not the nicest language, but there's no avoided it. And you can
always use that on the backend if you have to - and if you need to spend time
learning something for the backend part you'd be better served learning about
relational databases than Ruby.

Anyway, between JS, HTML, and CSS, you're going to have a lot to learn. At
least with CSS these days you can pretty much start with flexbox for layout,
and maybe if you're lucky you'll never have to learn all the old horrible
methods of getting things to look reasonable - or you'll have a solid
foundation when you do encounter them.

~~~
Immortalin
Problem is, none of the frameworks allows you to get up and running as quickly
as Rails. Even Django doesn't come close in matching the sheer amount of magic
in the Rails. There are gems available for everything under the sun; it's fun
and all to play around with new frameworks but having to reinvent the wheel
gets tiresome really quickly. Debugging can be a bit tricky and it's not the
most performant framework out there but the overall productivity still
outweighs everything else on the long term. Nothing else (except perhaps MS
Access and their RAD tools) comes close to the speed at which one can get a
CRUD app up and running and CRUD apps are pretty much 80% of all web apps.

~~~
wolco
Getting php with the laravel framework running is much easier and quicker

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cercatrova
But then you'd have to work in PHP

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Xoros
Yeah, who would do that ? Seriously, who are those Facebook, Wikipedia or
Wordpress anyway...

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gkop
The Show HN from over 3 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7466487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7466487)

Anecdote: I hired an Odin Project "graduate" in early 2015, somebody who had
gotten a CS degree 10 years earlier but never done anything with it. The Odin
Project had prepared him to hit the ground running on modern web software
development, and also prepared him for evaluation for our job, with an
impressive capstone project. He was a successful hire without a doubt.

~~~
Double_a_92
What happened with the CS graduate?

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jve
I read it as it is the same person who has CS diploma.

~~~
Double_a_92
Oh yeah sorry... I read "and" instead of the comma ._.

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rolae
I am currently learning with the odin project. I see most of the discussion so
far focused on whether ruby is right language. I think the project is very
valuable not for its choice of language but for its overall excellent content
and approach. A few examples

\- When doing my first lessons on ruby you are asked to read several
tutorials. I thought, well I already learned that, but in every article I
managed to find something new.

\- It uses a multitude of other learning sources, does not even try to cover
too much themselves. So you get to learn in very different ways. Reading good
articles, watching some talks, downloading a repo where you need to write the
code to make the test run successfully. Overall I feel, I get the best
content, not because they write the best content (who could do that for all
the subjects?), but it points you to great content.

\- Contrary to many online tools, it forces you to work on your own system,
which is a good thing.

\- It often forces you to define the problem you are solving yourself. Many
online courses make it too easy, you just learn coding. You don't learn to
structure the problem.

\- It also tries to give you a solid programming knowledge before going into
web development. I really appreciate that. It's so easy to learn some angular
or vue.js, then you... just need to fetch some data, ah how do I store data,
oh and authentication and authorization, oh and... and quickly you get lost. I
think it's is very beneficial to first get some solid programming knowledge
before diving into the whole server / db / frontend stack.

So I can highly recommend this approach. BTW: even the creators are thinking
of driving the course more towards JS
([https://github.com/TheOdinProject/curriculum/issues/5633](https://github.com/TheOdinProject/curriculum/issues/5633))

edit: formatting

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ceautery
From the "Handling a job offer" page:

"they've been totally in control of the process until now and they've probably
dragged their feet because they can (who knows, an even better developer might
show up, right?)."

I don't care about the which-language-is-best-to-start-with debate that is
being argued in full force here. If you want to rails, knock yourself out. If
you want to JS, woo! JS!. I care a lot about seeing your potential employer as
an antagonist. They have just indicated to you that they like you enough to
invite you to join them. Negotiate, sure, but assume good faith. And the very
idea that they were waiting for a better candidate who didn't show up
undervalues you. YOU were the one that impressed them most. How well you code
was only a part of their choice. They liked your personality best, too, and
your honesty, and your dedication, and that indefinable other thing that's
hard to quantify.

They are likely the good guys, and they see you the same way. Now go ask for a
better salary, or more vacation, but don't assume the worst.

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snowcrshd
Is this still active? I had the impression they (the project's creators) had
left this in favor of Viking Code School [1].

Apparently Viking Code School has both Ruby and JS separate tracks (I may be
misremembering, though)

[1] [https://www.vikingcodeschool.com](https://www.vikingcodeschool.com)

~~~
KevinMul
Hey,I'm one of the maintainers of the project and can ensure you its very much
alive :)

Erik the original creator of The Odin Project, has moved on to focus on
Viking. But theres a bunch of us working on improving the project.

~~~
snowcrshd
That's great to know! The work you guys do is awesome!

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scyclow
The fact that their website looks like garbage on mobile doesn't really
inspire a lot of confidence in me.

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gkop
Perhaps they make up for this with a hilarious Contact Us page?
[https://www.theodinproject.com/contact](https://www.theodinproject.com/contact)

~~~
qmarchi
I spy with my little eye, way too much italicize.

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wyqydsyq
The project itself is a great concept but pushing people into RoR and jQuery?
Really? Come on, it's 2017. Ruby is hardly a marketable skill, there are very
few agencies still utilising it on new projects. I'd also be shocked to see a
new project built with jQuery in this day and age.

Teach beginners backend JavaScript with Node.js. It's not a matter of personal
preference, JavaScript is objectively easier for beginners to learn and
utilise for backend programming because arbitrarily introducing another
language when they already know front-end JS increases cognitive load for no
benefit.

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bdcravens
Interesting that the graphic for "Build Your Own Tools" is the XCode icon,
even though this is a web development course, not a mobile one.

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srikz
Thanks for making this. Quick feedback: The 'Points to Ponder' section in the
'Javascript Basics' course should probably be put in a Bootstrap Well. On
browsers/OSs where the scroll bar isn't shown unless you scroll, it can easily
be missed. I feel if it has to be a scroller within a scroller, it should be
visibly distinguished. Good luck!

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peternicky
This is an example of a terrible web app. I think a company that provides a
course to learn web development should put in the effort to make their website
a shining example of the best techniques and technologies. This looks like it
was made by an amateur.

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olegious
Is there a Python version of this?

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hackermailman
w/Django yes [https://www.springboard.com/learning-paths/web-
development-p...](https://www.springboard.com/learning-paths/web-development-
python-django/)

There's also this Java/Typescript curriculum
[https://www.edx.org/micromasters/software-
development](https://www.edx.org/micromasters/software-development)

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unclebucknasty
Wait. Somebody figured out how to do Web development?

~~~
tempodox
Not really.

