Best Online Courses #7

Become a Front-End Web Developer on Lynda

To briefly intro this review, Lynda (aka “LinkedIn Learning”) offers a variety of “Paths” on their site that aggregate a bunch of related courses on a topic and orders them from beginner to more advanced to form an intensive and in-depth learning experience. Their particular path on front-end web development is currently comprised of 13 individual courses that are each full-length in their own right. Completing the entire Path can take a while, and it took me a couple of months back when I did it in 2016, but I found it to be well worth the effort!

The courses in this Path have expanded since 2016 when I completed it, as it consisted of 10 courses back then, while it consists of 13 courses today in 2020 as of this writing. And unfortunately, some of the individual courses that were in the Path in 2016 are no longer in the Path today either, so I can’t speak to some of the newer replacement courses. It’s certainly disappointing to no longer see some of the courses that made this Path as good as it was, which included HTML and CSS courses by James Williamson, and a JavaScript course by Simon Allardice.

That said, while I haven’t done some of the newer replacement courses, I have taken other courses from some of the replacement instructors, like Christina Truong and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, who are just about as effective as James Williamson and Simon Allardice at teaching CSS and JavaScript, respectively. Certainly one of the major pros to this Path on Lynda is that it covers a wide breadth of material that you likely won’t find on other platforms. To that point, very few platforms have extensive courses on HTML or CSS, while the ones on Lynda are some of that best that can be found. Ray Villabolos is a stand-out instructor as well and has some very solid & useful courses in the Path that cover Bootstrap and Sass and go fairly in-depth on those topics.

Although James Williamson’s courses on HTML are no longer in the Path, I’d strongly recommend doing those as well, as they’re some of the best courses on HTML that I’ve seen anywhere online, and contain material that just won’t be found anywhere else.

Conclusion: Very highly recommended for intermediate-level developers willing to put in an approximate 2- to 3-month time investment for a solid initial grounding in front-end web design & development that beats out just about every other online course platform that I’ve seen in terms of comprehensiveness. Also by far the best Path to get started with on Lynda to get a taste of the quality of their platform!

Rating: 5 out of 5