Codecademy - Review

Codecademy is an online, interactive learning platform, that offers coding courses in a variety of languages.

To utilise the website, you simply sign up for an account and choose from a variety of available courses.

The base account is free to use, but there is also an option to upgrade to a 'Pro' subscription, which allows the user access to much more resources and lessons.

For this review, I decided to delve into C++. This course was my first real introduction to the language. That being said, how was it?

The Experience

This course starts off relatively easy and gradually dives into the more complicated topics. Some of the material covered included conditionals, loops, vectors, classes, and pointers.

Overall, I found Codecademy to do quite a good job explaining the various subject matters. Each section began with a page of text, which would give an introduction to the topic you were going to be learning.

You then progress through various interactive learning exercises. Each exercise will have specified objectives which you must complete to proceed.

While you do get a reasonable amount of content with a free account, there is a lot of content which you cannot access without upgrading. Many of the practice activities and projects are hidden behind a paywall, and you can not truly complete the course without this additional content.

Who is it for?

If I were going to recommend this course to anyone, it would probably be to people with some coding experience in other similar languages who want to try C++ out.

I believe the start of this course could be followable for complete beginners, but later topics may become more difficult to grasp without previous knowledge. I think a course with more access to exercises and practice may be better for complete beginners.

Is it worth it?

While I found the course a good introduction to C++, I did find the free content a bit basic. I understand keeping content behind a paywall, but I also found it slightly discouraging being constantly forced to skip over aspects of the course which seemed to look like helpful sections and projects.

One aspect I did like about this course was that it gave a brief and unintimidating introduction to using the command line to compile and execute code. I personally have always found using the command line a tad intimidating, just because I don't have as much experience with it, and knowing which commands to use can be a bit confusing. I wasn't expecting this course to cover it, but just using it casually in the exercises was satisfying.

Once finished the course, you do not receive a certificate unless you pay for the subscription.

Ultimately, I did find this course good as a starting point, but I felt too many features were hidden behind the paywall. I would love to see some more of the exercises, and maybe a project, being available for free. If you're looking for a short, self-paced beginner C++ course, try this one out!

Sources:

All images have been screenshot from Codecademy