Codecademy

Per a friends referral, today I tried https://www.codecademy.com. My username was already taken so I must have tried this site a while back. I was able to reset my password and locate a course called "Learn Java". I liked that the dashboard looked very similar to CodeFights and figured it would be good practice for working up to using the CodeFights website. I did not find any other Java related courses in the catalog but figured I would give it a chance and maybe this course was required before showing other options.

I started working on the course "Learn Java". It was going ok considering I have a good deal of coursework behind me and was familiar with a lot of the things they were talking about such as variable types and writing equations with operators. It had a lot of hands on practice editing existing code but may be confusing to someone new to coding. It didn't offer much help if you were stuck on something. For example, I entered "5>7" with no spaces where they wanted "5 > 7". The previous example would work with no issue in an IDE or command prompt so I was somewhat disappointed.

I flew through the first 50% of the course with no issues and then tried to work on the Object Oriented section and the page just froze on a blank screen. I could go back to other sections with no issue. I rebooted my computer, cleared cookies and even tried another browser and no go on the next section. I'll add this to my notebook to do list for a later date but so far have been unimpressed with Codecademy.