A Thousand Dollars an Hour?
I recently signed up for the Client-Side Web Programming Certificate Series from The O’Reilly School of Technology. However, I decided to cancel about an hour after enrolling. What happened? Well, the idea was that I wanted to formalize the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that I’ve picked up over the last few years. Plus, in the end I would end up with a certificate that I could put on my resume. But, things went downhill rapidly.
In the first lesson, header tags were used to render text in different sizes. There was absolutely no discussion of their semantic meaning, as in, they are really section headers in documents.
Following that, the <center> tag was used to graphically center some text on the page. This was the same lesson that introduced me to the bgcolor and text attributes of the <body> tag. Next up was the <font> tag. Apparently, they didn’t bother to take their own advice and look at the linked reference. If they had, they would have known that were trying to teach me deprecated tags!
And then, it was on to learn about how to layout pages using tables.
I also couldn’t find any mention of doctypes or quirksmode.
The javascript course wasn’t much better. They tried to tell me that javascript isn’t really an object oriented language. Don’t tell that to Douglas Crockford, who is pretty familiar with javascript.
It’s apparently a good idea to use the javascript: protocol, and I also need to enclose all of my inline scripts inside of html comments (even though it hasn’t been necessary since Navigator 3).
The user interface wasn’t very functional; I had a hard time navigating between courses and had to clear text authenticate multiple times just to use different portions of the site. I couldn’t figure out how to cancel. The site was also ugly, but that’s both a minor and personal problem.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the rest of the content is bad. However, it does say to me that the folks at O’Reilly School of Technology haven’t been paying attention to web development for the last few years. I wanted to start from first principles. I wanted to solidify the knowledge that I’ve picked up on my own from the web and various books (many from O’Reilly.) I know that the HTML/CSS course is meant for absolute beginners, but they are teaching ‘best practices’ that haven’t been best practices for years! And, if they try and start me out with things that I know are either bad form, or just flat out wrong, then I’m done.
All in all, I was very disappointed in both the content and the site used to present it. I have always found O’Reilly’s books to be very good, but, at least for the courses that I looked at, they fell well short of the quality that I was expecting.
There are plenty of other places on the web to get better information about modern web development and front end engineering.
The certificate would have been nice though.
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