Code School Review: Quality Courses Outweigh Cost

About Code School

Code School is an “online learning destination for existing and aspiring developers” based in Orlando, FL, and owned by parent company and fellow online-learning website, Pluralsight. Code School uses theme-based story lines and game mechanics within each course to effectively engage users as they learn programming. They offer quite a few free courses and projects so you can test drive their platform before subscribing to a monthly plan (which is actually a great price for how impressive their course quality is). We did a full Coding School review by going through their Python courses, keep reading to see our findings!

Hands-On Coding School Review

To get started with this review, I first created a free account and tried out their free “Try Python” course. The course started with a quick summary video of what this section will be covering. You can see from the image below that Coding School uses quirky themes for each course to aid with learning. I think this learning model works perfectly not only because of the weirdness factor, but because the video is short and effective for giving a quick heads up of what’s to come.

As soon as the video finishes, you dive right into their practice coding platform. The left side of the screen contains the questions and guides you through the course, while the right side is your programming space.

It starts out easy, but as you continue through the course, it isn’t always as simple as typing in what they tell you to. It actually takes a bit of digging; for example, it may tell you to solve a certain equation without telling you what all of the operators are. This is great because it makes you pull up the slides to find that info yourself, very similar to a typical class setting.

The course is obviously self-paced, so you can exit at any time and resume where you left off. You can also jump ahead and backtrack to review your work by clicking through the table of contents. A progress bar on top of the screen keeps you up to date as you move through the courses.

✅ Course Selection

Code School’s course catalog covers a wide array of programming languages which can be completed within a holistic program covering everything from the basics to advanced. At the time of this review, Code School offers course paths on the following languages/areas:

• HTML/CSS
• JavaScript
• Ruby
• Elixir
• Android (Coming Soon)
• PHP
• .NET
• Python
• iOS
• Git
• SQL/NoSQL

It’s important to note that there are even more courses to pick from that just are not a part of a larger program, including Docker, R data visualization, and more.

Code School also has a new section of their website dedicated to coding projects, some of which are free to do. For example, one of the free projects is called Hell, Code School which allows you to learn how the projects work by using Git, GitHub, and HTML.

✅ Quality

This is where Code School shines above the rest. I feel they create the highest quality courses out there due to the creativity (elaborate themes for each course), a mix of hands-on coding and traditional slide-based learning, and the simplistic platform which allows you to stop on the fly and continue where you left off.

✅ Price

At the time of this review, Code School’s price is $29 per month, or $19 per month if you sign up for a year. If you’re willing to sign up for the yearly plan, the $19 price mark is cheaper than much of the competition out there including Treehouse. However, even if you want to go month-to-month, $29 is still absolutely worth it because the courses are phenomenal.

I strongly encourage you to at least sign up for their free account and try out a few of their courses without paying; if you like them as much as I do, I’m sure you’ll be diving into quite a few more courses in their paid subscription.