As a sys admin I’m not too bad at writing pretty complex shell scripts and the like, but I’ve never done too much web development, CSS or Javascript. I maintain the SysAdminMan website and wanted to learn more about CSS and Javascript.
Looking round at some of the online training available I decided to go with teamtreehouse.com. I think probably the most important thing is to find a solution that suits your style of learning. Treehouse use a mixture of videos, quizzes and coding tasks. You watch a series of videos about a subject, take a few multiple choice quizzes along the way and the write some code at the end.
The videos are quirky and lighthearted. Some of the presenters are a little better than others, but all of the videos that I’ve watched are of a high quality. They tend to be around 4 to 7 minutes long, so it’s pretty easy to dive in and out when possible.
The coding challenges are probably the most interesting thing (which actually didn’t work for me initially but they fixed that). You are presented with some existing HTML, CSS, Javascript etc and asked to make changes using the information learned on the video. After making the changes you click ‘Check my work’ and it tells you if you’re right or wrong.