Review of Scrimba’s Free JavaScript Course

Originally posted on my blog January 4, 2022. Edited and reposted to Hashnode on March 22, 2022.

My Prior Attempt at Learning JavaScript

First, some background. Over a year ago, I bought a course on Udemy from an instructor I had studied under in a different class. It was a class on Sass. Liking the class, I purchased his JavaScript course. Partway through I threw my hands up in frustration and gave up on JavaScript. I thought I would never understand it.

I moved on to Python. Everyone says Python is so much easier. And yes, Python seemed to make more sense to me. (I took Angela Yu's Boot-camp which I also purchased on Udemy.)

Scrimba is awesome!

Then, I heard about Scrimba. I eventually signed up for a free account and started their FREE JavaScript course.

Wow! I was completely blown away. I loved it. I couldn't believe I was actually understanding JavaScript for the very first time. (I am not affiliated with Scrimba besides being a student and they did not pay me to say this!)

The course is 7 hours worth of "videos" and you code the challenges right there in the window! I was very skeptical of the set up before jumping in, but I was completely wrong.

This has been a great way to learn. No more going back and forth from the browser to my IDE. Yes, I found out a bit late about the floating video feature in Chrome and kick myself for not knowing about it earlier.

(ETA: Once I got to larger projects, I switched to both VScode and even Replit to type my own code. But for smaller challenges, working right in the Scrimba window is perfect!)

We made a Blackjack game and a Google Chrome extension! I've always wanted to learn how to make a Chrome extension. Now I understand what they actually are (pretty much a miniature webpage) and how they work (how to package them, local storage, etc.).

I plan on making some more extensions on my own, especially once I learn (re-learn) how to use APIs.

Suggestions for Scrimba

The only "problem" (annoyance) I can think of is if you have a question while you're working through a lesson, there's nowhere on Scrimba's screencast where you can ask the instructor or any of the other students.

You can however hop on to the Discord server but I think they should just integrate a community into Scrimba, like you have with Udemy. But I don't foresee that happening. They seem very proud of their large Discord server. It's very active and yes, you can get help there but I just think it would be easier on the students and even the instructors if there was an integrated QA section.

There actually used to be and integrated comments sections on the lessons but they got rid of it unfortunately. I'm not sure what the issue was. It is in a tiny popup in the bottom corner. You can still view comments/questions from before they disabled the feature.

Not a "problem", but I'd like to see more courses on Scrimba. I'm sure they're working on it. (ETA: Yes, they are working on more courses!)

What courses would I like to see? Maybe programming for web 3.0 (blockchains, metaverse, etc.) But more importantly, backend development. I'd love to see a course on Ruby on Rails and some database courses (MySQL, MongoDB, etc.) which, according to their FAQs, they are working on! Yay!

Anything programming-related that will be useful for web 3.0 to prepare us to be competitive in new technologies.

Scrimba Pro Subscription

As I write the draft of this post, I took advantage of the 70% off holiday sale off of Scrimba Pro annual subscription. So, I paid $115 for a whole year of access to all the courses offered on Scrimba! (I'll review Scrimba Pro in the future after having used it for some months.)

I just started the Front End Developers Course yesterday. I already know HTML and CSS but it's good to brush up, especially on CSS as I've had trouble with flex in the past. Also, things are constantly changing so it's good to go through the basics again. (I first started building sites in the late 90s/early 2000s!)

(ETA: Currently, as of 3/22/2022, I've completed 65% of the course! So I'm still engaged and sticking with it. I will be learning React soon. There are 20 hours worth of lessons.)

So would I recommend you check out Scrimba if you want to learn web development? Yes! Try them out for free: https://scrimba.com/