Check resources like coursera. You can get surprisingly far on the free courses and the instructors are better than a random local college.

Yea I have been doing coursera and udacity right now. I figured if I can get most of the education from those two, the classes at the junior college should be a breeze. Also doing the community college classes to clear some prerequisite in case I do want to apply to grad school down the future.

Codeacademy is great also.

Lots of cdm people in here. Kinda surprising. I just entered into the pre req phase this fall. Transferred in my intro to programming credit and took just discrete structures for CS this quarter. It is a pretty tough class, as stated earlier by others. Will be in dat structures and systems winter quarter.

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It only gets harder with the foundational classes! I found Systems to be the hardest of the pre-req classes, but the second one was pretty fun.

I know coursera and udacity are trying to change the game of brick and mortar schools which is a freaking great.

For those who are interested, udacity is pairing up with Georgia Tech to provide an online masters program for only $6600

link is https://www.udacity.com/georgiatech

I agree and have been working towards getting into one of those since I found out about them in the spring. A few things though:

- That article is from May of 2012 when those things were still very new. Some people worry that the market will eventually be flooded with candidates from these schools and that the job placement rates and salaries will not maintain themselves. While that certainly could happen, most indications seem to be that there is a large shortage of available programmers in the U.S., with even more of a shortage projected in the future.

- The good ones are extremely exclusive. We're talking about a 3%-10% acceptance rate.

- Be careful that the one you're choosing is reputable. Many of them have been cropping up, and many of them are probably crap.

- It's not really "a few" grand, it's a minimum of $10K and those seem to be rising, closer to $20K. Except for the couple that take a percentage of your first year's salary.

Do these bootcamps only teach you programming?

What about AI, machine learning, computer vision, scientific computing, data mining, etc...? Not hating on the bootcamps but I guess it just depends what you want to do with your career. Also, I know nothing about these bootcamps except for reading the last 5 posts so I'm definitely not one who should be commenting on them.

Yeah when I checked out those 9 month programs it was pretty in line with what college costs. A few grand it was not

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The "reputable" ones generally seem to be focused on one language like Ruby, getting you good enough to be an entry-level developer. They aren't going into depth like CS degrees would, but their argument would be essentially "who cares?"

I feel like the best path is get into one of those schools if you can, get a decent job, learn on the job and continue your learning on other topics such as those that you listed in order to advance yourself and your career.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, they just focus on programming. And usually just one language (or maybe a few). They try to get you specialized and up to speed on the most relevant/marketable language(s) at the moment.

I guess it depends on the bootcamp. I'm under the impression that the one I linked to earlier is among the best around, and that's only $10K in tuition. Also, the article says they reimburse $5K if you get a job. Considering that the program only takes 10 weeks and has an average starting salary of $79K, I'd say that's a steal (especially compared to traditional college degrees, which usually take tens of thousands of dollars and years to complete). It is important to keep in mind what someone mentioned above, though, and that's that these bootcamps are competitive to get into. At the same time, so are the computer science programs at many good schools.

But other bootcamps I've found are fairly cheap. TeaLeaf is only a couple grand. I think another one is free (although you have to fund living in NYC for a few months).

I totally agree. I think the best strategy for these bootcamps is to use them as a stepping stone into a good job. So bust your ass for the few months, learn the language(a) they focus on, and get the best job you can. Once you've accomplished that, then you can start to get a broader knowledge base by self studying, taking night classes, or whatever.

Did you go to this particular camp ? At any rate can we stop with the quoting an average salary for a sample size of one group

No, I haven't attended it. I'm trying to teach myself. I just think it's a better option than getting a degree in CS.

Even if it's just one group, it's still pretty impressive given the financial and time investment. Besides, we don't even need to look at their salary stats -- just look at salaries for Rails developers.

As far as I can tell, there are only a handful that are worth anything. You can link to one bootcamp pushing out employable students, but there are apparently many more that are pushing out wannabe brogrammers.

To say the least, I've heard some scathing things about the applicants from these places down here in LA, so if you can't get into the best few knowing you can land a job right away, don't bother.

Plus it would be very difficult to put your eggs in this basket, from the article:

That's the first session, and they've had several dozens of sessions plus a rep. I'm sure they have 10x as many applicants now.

If you're willing to shell out that kinda money, it might be worth giving the $7k GATech online MSCS a shot.

Good point. That's also generally true of universities as well, though.

Yeah, that's an interesting program. Does anybody know how it works? Do you just go through Udacity courses, or does GA Tech add additional online courses for you too?

One thing to remember though is almost every place I've encountered asks you to do a coding problem one way or another. Either on the whiteboard or on some sort of internet connection that they can see what you do. So regarding the "getting the job" part I would think that the boot camp approach could conceivably come in very handy. I make no value judgement about how effective the "do the coding problem live" approach is, just saying that for landing a job it is pretty much essential that you can do that.

I got accepted to one of these coding immersive bootcamps. Will report back when the program starts in a few months.

Cool. What is the criteria for being accepted besides having the money? Also. what is the bootcamp focused on?

I'm all for being self-taught, but I honestly doubt someone of very good but not world-class talent can become an excellent computer vision guy by taking a course in Rails, getting a job in Rails, and then studying computer vision (and all it implies like probability, statistics, linear algebra, scientific computing, and machine learning) on the side. Obviously, a few incredibly talented people may prove me wrong, but if you want to go into CV or something else that's very math-heavy, going to a three month web dev program seems like the wrong track.

Excellent thoughts and is the main thing missing from boot camps that a real education offers. Sure, you can do it, but at the end of the road, you will likely be a CRUD developer for life, and it'd be unlikely you'd ever have the opportunity to work in other fields without good education, and it is unlikely you'll have time to learn much outside of job-maintenance items on top of a 60+ hour work week.

I always suggested that anyone considering a boot camp should teach themselves as much possible before going in. In fact, do one better: start with a blank page, build a database, something server-side w/o a framework, and deploy it to a bona-fide server (Heroku doesn't really count here but you can take a waiver on it), and see your creation to fruition. At the end, you will be able to gain much more from a boot camp. There is no good reason to spend money to learn the basics of SQL and calling it.

You will know if doing CRUD is something you'd be interested in doing for the rest of your life. I know my personal answer to this question, and this is why I'd dive towards a masters first and it isn't even close.

Overwhelming majority of software developers that i've encountered don't do code for the "math heavy" topics you mention. BTW I took courses in linear algebra, probability, statistics, physics, and chemistry in college. Didn't mean squat regarding what I have done in software development IE they are pretty much non applicable to me and the overwhelming majority of developers I have encountered.

Dave with all do respect you pose a very negative view of the lot of the software developer that doesn't mesh with reality in my view.

Sorry, but what was negative about that post and what does your opinion of my outlook have to do with the quality of the post?

A romanticized view is that a programmer wants to know how stuff works and what I suggested isn't that difficult. I also think it is silly to pay money for basic information that can easily be found for free.

I said CV devs need those topics. It would be ridiculous to claim all devs need those topics. Do you think that someone can become a good CV dev without knowing linear algebra?

LOL you pick CV as reason why bootcamp s are a bad idea. I post that overwhelming majority of developers don't ever get involved with CV. Then you move the goal post.