Boot.devReviews of boot.dev

I found boot.dev maddening about half the time. Each unit would start slowly and just as you'd start to feel like you were learning something the difficulty would ramp up insanely quickly and the explanations would all but disappear. It's like if someone spent forty short lessons explaining what wood and nails are and then told you to build a split level family home with a four car garage. For example, at one particularly difficult juncture the directions said to not only write some code but also to "run a bunch of tests" to see if it was working. Up to that point we'd been exposed to maybe a paragraph worth of explanation as to how to run any kind of test. I had no idea how to build a bunch of tests and when they didn't work I had no idea if the problem was my original code or my tests. I don't need to pay that kind of money so I can hop on YouTube to learn how to do what I'm supposedly being taught by the course. I could have done that for free. Most maddening of all was the near-complete lack of English language skills demonstrated by whoever designs the courses. I would frequently find myself stuck and banging my head against the wall while becoming overly dependent on the AI assistant only to discover that my confusion had nothing to do with coding and everything to do with the half assed directions. I cannot explain how frustrating it is to spend hours upon hours trying to solve a coding problem only to realize "Oh! THAT'S what they were asking us to do?" Fundamentally I left the experience being able to do a lot of individual tasks but having no real sense of the big picture. I can make for loops, if statements, etc. like a champ but at the end of the day I still have no idea what one uses those things to accomplish. I completed the entire Python course and still have no idea what one would actually do with Python. They have projects built into the course but they all come with some disclaimer that you shouldn't really use what you've done for any practical purpose and/or they wrote half the code for you behind the scenes. I never got the sense that I'd done something useful or complete. Nothing about what I learned made me think of using Python to build any kind of project on my own. I feel like I was taught how to rebuild a carburetor without knowing or learning what a car is.