I spent most of today completing Codecademy's JavaScript track. My quick thoughts:
Pros:
+ It's super easy and fast to code right in the browser. No downloads, no compiling, no setting up environments - awesome.
+ Within a few hours, I am fairly up to speed on the language's syntax and concepts (note: I'm not a total newbie to programming)
+ The hints and message boards answered virtually all of my questions. For example, the point of extending a class via prototype rather than in the constructor itself.
Cons:
- The last third of the track was written by different authors. The material was sometimes duplicated or jumped ahead in difficulty without a common voice.
- It's not clear to me how I'd use JavaScript in practice in terms of applications, dev tools, etc.
- The authors solved all the logical challenges - walking through the exercises was almost too simplistic
- I definitely need practice problems to deepen my understanding!
Overall, I thought it was a good crash course. I played around a bit with the Mandrill API in their API section - which is much more applied. We'll probably use it for Ed Republic so maybe that's a part that I can work on.