My favourite course instructors for web development
I have been coding since 2012 and have been self-educating in modern JavaScript web development since 2015. Over the years I have taken many good courses and tutorials, and many meh courses and tutorials.
There are 3 course instructors who in my opinion deliver the best education for learning modern web development. Here is my review of them and why they’re so great. There are links to their courses but they’re not affiliate links. Yes, this is an endorsement of their courses.
3. Stephen Grider
https://www.udemy.com/user/sgslo/
When Redux was the hot topic to learn and everyone ‘had’ to learn it, Stephen Grider’s courses on Udemy is how I learned Redux.
Redux was notorious for being complicated and difficult to learn. I wouldn’t have been able to get past the initial phase of ‘what the hell is this’ without Stephen Grider’s courses.
The best way for a beginner to learn in my opinion is to build everything from scratch. From npm init, to writing the lines of code, to seeing the code work on your screen, and having to make everything happen yourself.
That’s how Stephen Grider teaches his courses, everything is from scratch. There is no boilerplate that you install that you don’t understand how it works, he works with you to build everything from npm init to the final line of code.
WebPack and Redux are notorious for being difficult to understand. I’d struggle every time I’d start a new React project and have to implement a webpack config and Redux boilerplate to get something going.
I wouldn’t have even gotten to the point of struggling if not for Stephen Grider’s courses. He walks you through every line of code to create a working web app built with React, Redux and Webpack. He does a great job at explaining the concepts you’re working with and the reasons behind the lines of code you write.
He also provides great diagrams that help you visualize complex concepts. You then take those concepts and turn them into code.
I took his courses a few years ago back when what he taught was more relevant. I’m not sure what he teaches now but he’s a great teacher with a great teaching process so whatever he’s teaching you’ll learn and become confident in.
2. Wes Bos
Wes Bos is a fellow Canadian web developer who teaches modern Javascript courses with technologies like React, Node, Graphql and CSS grid. Everything he does is cutting edge in the web development world.
He has great free and paid courses so if you don’t want to spend $100 on a course you can take several of his free courses which are probably 80% as great as his paid courses.
For example, his javascript30 course was amazing and improved my skills as a javascript coder by a lot. Before I took that course I didn’t know anything about DOM manipulation and now I am quite confident in my DOM manipulation abilities.
I also improved my javascript array method skills greatly and using ES6 array functions like map, sort, reduce, filter and the like improved my coding abilities and quality by a ton.
His courses are very rigorous, in depth, long and you improve your skills a lot. Be prepared to struggle for a long time with his courses but it’s worth it.
To be honest, I haven’t done 100% of some of his courses (even the ones I paid for) but even doing a part or a lot of his courses improved my skills by a lot. I reference his code all the time and copy the coding style he uses for most of my projects.
One thing I am not a big fan of is how he provides heavy boilerplate for his courses. This has its benefits like having the same package.json as him so you don’t run into frustrating version problems. I personally like starting everything from scratch.
Eventually the boilerplate becomes a non-issue because there is a ton of repetition when you’re working through his courses so the important concepts become engrained in you even without starting everything from scratch.
He has great real world coding styles that are very reusable and if you copy how he codes, then you’ll become better.
Wes Bos is a great teacher with high quality courses on technologies you probably care about. I recommend his courses because they’re so great even if they’re a little pricey.
1. Ben Awad
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-8QAzbLcRglXeN_MY9blyw
One of the newest course instructors is the young Ben Awad. I don’t remember how I found out about him but his courses are #1 in my opinion for a junior-intermediate level developer.
I wanted to learn how to create real web applications using modern technologies like graphql, react, node, orms, and things like that.
I also desperately wanted to understand user authentication so I could create user based applications instead of just creating shallow web apps that don’t have login systems.
I have been looking for those types of courses for years and never found anything of high quality.
Ben Awad came out of nowhere and showed me the light.
I don’t expect too much out of Youtube tutorials so when I watched a video from this young guy teaching authentication and full stack app development I didn’t expect much.
Most Youtube instructors do the bare minimum for their videos and always plug something like a link to their mediocre digital product. Their videos get views because they use good keywords that people are looking for.
Ben doesn’t plug anything, all his courses are available for free on his channel and best of all they’re actually high quality courses. Not only does he walk you through the code that you watch him type, he explains the concepts and reasons behind why he’s writing the code he’s writing and explains it well.
All the videos are from scratch, from the project initialization, to creating the tests, to debugging and everything. It’s amazing.
Since you are watching the creation of his projects from scratch, advanced technologies like typescript, graphql, and things like that are not intimidating and seem possible. Rather than you reading through verbose documentation from things like the library’s website, you are shown examples of how to use the APIs of things like graphql, stripe for payments, and how to write typescript code because Ben shows you from the beginning and explains everything well.
I would have never thought I could create a user authentication based, graphql server, written in typescript, with tests 6 months ago. Today that is my go to stack and it’s all thanks to Ben.
He is an extremely fast typer so it’s a little frustrating trying to follow along with him but if you can make it through like 20 or 30 videos of his, every other course is like a walk in the park in terms of following along. Be prepared to rewind and pause the videos a lot.
He also has a discord channel where he actually helps people out. It’s so above and beyond any other course instructor that he is my clear #1 for course instructors. You can find the link to his discord channel on his youtube videos, come and join!
What drew me to his videos are the technologies he teaches. I am very interested in modern web development tools that everyone raves about like graphql, node, react, typescript etc… Unfortunately, it’s hard to find great learning resources about them that are free or affordable.
If you want to learn about graphql, react, node, typescript, postgresql, ORMs, react native, testing, deployment, docker, and all the related tools and technologies in modern web development, watch his videos, you will learn a ton.
Bonus — The Futur
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-b3c7kxa5vU-bnmaROgvog
The Future is a great Youtube channel that teaches new creative industry entrepreneurs (mostly graphic design related) how to run their business.
The videos are high quality, well edited and with great advice. I recommend this channel if you want to learn how to be a great freelancer or entrepreneur with your creative skills like design, coding or related fields.
