What is Treehouse?
The expanding field of technology has created a higher demand of tech skills than the market can currently supply.
Academia can’t keep up with technology and employers are struggling to find talent to grow their teams as our economy shifts into the digital landscape. To fill the gap between academia and the job market, online programs have become increasingly popular in the last couple of years.
Among the many companies of online educators, one of the most highly regarded is Treehouse. Many people refer Treehouse as among the best to start learning web development. So what makes Treehouse so great?
Lets find out in this review.
Treehouse overview
Treehouse focuses on teaching web and software development. The company focuses on teaching topics such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and more.
Most of their courses are focused on 3 key areas of technology:
- Web development: Treehouse focuses on helping students become web developers. They focus on both front-end and back-end technologies and provide students with a range of popular programming languages and frameworks to learn.
- iOS development: Treehouse teaches students Swift and Objective-C. Both are crucial languages to learn iOS development.
- Android development: Treehouse has an extensive collection of courses on the Java programming language and app development in the Android environment.
Apart from these three core areas of technology, there are also other courses available. Students can take classes on business, digital literacy and design as well.
Students typically follow an instructor or a set of instructors along a built in collection of courses called “tracks“. These guide students to a particular part of a technology, whether you want to be a web, iOS, android or game developer; tracks guide you to a collection of topics to master in order to be proficient in a particular domain of technology.
Gamification is built into the system
Treehouse doesn’t any external qualifications for their students unless you are enrolled into their Techdegree program, but they do have gamification to through points and badges to motivate students to learn.
Points are displayed with the student profile and it shows both students and potential employers an overview of the technologies someone has learned.
Price
Treehouse is a relatively cheap learning product. There are three levels of subscription learners can purchase.
- The basic membership costs USD 25 per month and gives students access to most of the learning material
- The pro membership costs USD 50 per month and gives students to all the lessons provided in the basic membership plus access to special workshops, conference videos and seminars as well as the ability to download lessons to your computer.
- The Techdegree starts from USD 199 per month and gives students to all the learning material, one on one mentoring and a treehouse certified “techdegree” for students to use as a proof of qualification. The techdegrees are technology specific, so you must choose to learn either: Frontend development, fullstack JavaScript, Java development, python development, iOS development or Android development. The tech degree programs are extensive and require hundreds of hours of practice which ultimately lead you to become job ready students.
Where Treehouse shines
Tons of content to learn from which are specific to web technologies
Treehouse only provides content for web design, front/backend, app and game development. This focused approached to teaching means that the quality of the content tends to be higher and generally the output is greater, since instructors don’t have to create content in other specialities.
Currently Treehouse offers courses in the following subjects:
- Android
- Business
- Frontend Web Development – HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Design
- Digital Literacy
- iOS
- Backend Development – Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, C#
- Game Development
- WordPress
Some of the courses are more comprehensive than others. Treehouse specifically focuses on a few areas of their curriculum – particularly HTML, CSS, JavaSCript, Android, iOS.
Workspaces make setup and learning easy
Treehouse have built their own text editor called Workspaces.
Workspaces allow you to write code in the browser and watch the results of your input without having to worry about setting up any particular development environment.
Although setting up a local environment for development isn’t too difficult, it is comforting to know that workspaces is built to making learning easier for new students. When students don’t have to worry about particular set up details, the barrier to learning becomes lower and it encourages more people to learn about technology which is why Workspaces is so great.
Code Challenges aid with learning
Learning on Treehouse requires considerable effort. You’re not only stuck watching videos, but you’re also coding though out lessons. These code challenges reinforce what you’ve learned and help you apply the theory into practical exercises.
Without these code challenges, it’s easy to just start consuming knowledge, and not actually applying it.
Where Treehouse doesn’t deliver
Courses lack real world or practical examples
The course projects and exercises at times are limited to simple web applications. Although these lessons give you some idea of what real life projects will look like, most lessons leave you feeling like you’re stuck in the theoretical side of web development.
Lack Of Feedback
The community at Treehouse is great, but there is little engagement in the forums beyond answering questions to code challenges. The tutors are great and respond to student’s questions, but unlike a real school, instructors aren’t available all the time to help with learning.
Overall Treehouse Is A Great Place To Learn
Like most learn to code programs Treehouse comes with a free trial and this period is long enough for you to know if this is the learning environment good for you. Overall, this is a great starting point for web development and everyone interested in technology should definitely enrol into their basic plan.
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