Is The Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele Really The Real Deal?
By: Gabriel Schincariol Cavalcante
Tags: Web Development, JavaScript, Bootcamp, Coding, Technology

Why is this course so special? What does it offer?

As I said previously, I didn’t start with The Web Developer Bootcamp. First I did the Codecademy Learn JavaScript course, which was pretty good and gave me a decent foundation to keep learning, and then I finished JavaScript Ninja, by Fernando Daciuk, a course that focused only on vanilla JavaScript.

This second course was not a bad one, I learned a lot about the basics of JavaScript and understood how the language works, what it can do, what it can not, but I was disappointed. I was disappointed because a. it was not up to date, as Daciuk only covers ES5 (and he is not forthcoming about it in the course info — he also makes a promise that his course is the only one you need to learn JavaScript), b. it was not cheap, especially for dated content.

It was during the time that I was doing JavaScript Ninja that I learned about Colt’s course. It was on sale — it usually is. It only cost me a few bucks. And it had a lot, a lot! of good reviews. I was climbing my way up in JavaScript, but my lack of knowledge on HTML and CSS beyond the basic was a real problem and The Web Developer Bootcamp was the perfect solution.

So, what Colt Steele offers is the following:

HTML5

CSS3

Flexbox

Responsive Design

JavaScript (all 2020 modern syntax, ES6, ES2018, etc.)

Asynchronous JavaScript — Promises, async/await, etc.

— Promises, async/await, etc. AJAX and single-page apps

and single-page apps Bootstrap 4 and 5 (alpha)

SemanticUI*

Bulma CSS Framework

DOM Manipulation

Unix(Command Line) Commands

NodeJS

NPM

ExpressJS

Templating

REST

SQL vs. NoSQL databases

vs. databases MongoDB

Database Associations

Schema Design

Mongoose

Authentication From Scratch

Cookies & Sessions

Authorization

Common Security Issues — SQL Injection, XSS, etc.

Developer Best Practices

Deploying Apps

Cloud Databases

Image Upload and Storage

and Storage Maps and Geocoding

(* I don’t remember seeing Semantic UI, maybe it was part of the old version)

This is certainly not a small list of content. But it is exciting — well, it was exciting for me to see an online course that goes from the very basics of web development to the advanced world of databases, servers, authentication, and all that, pretty much what you will need if you decide to work with web dev in real life.

The curriculum is an upside, for sure. During the course, there are several small projects that Colt builds and it is fun to code along, because you have the feeling that you are finally creating something.

But the icing on the cake is the final and HUGE project called YelpCamp.

YelpCamp is a full web app, created on a Node.js server, using MongoDB, EJS, Express, Passport, Cloudinary, and a lot more. It has authentication, it has a comment section, it has a rating system — it is big, it is complex, and it is pretty cool.

With YelpCamp, everything you learned over the lessons will be put to use.

A quick note: one common complaint that I saw in the comments was that the Bootcamp became outdated. It seems that, for a while, Colt tried to put new content on it using notes, but without uploading new videos. When I bought it, tho, he had already redone all the content from scratch, so things like ES6 are well discussed.