One complaint I have with Code Academy is that it seems more interested in awarding me a badge rather than teaching me context, meaning, and mastery. The lessons are very to the point and you can get through them pretty easily. I do feel like in terms of the nitty gritty of executing the code, you do get better by going through. That said, it does not explain why you need to do these things or give any real qualitative explanations about why things are this way and why you might need to worry about them. At times I must also admit that I gave up on understanding the slim text and just used the code provided by fellow students in the forums as a template for understanding. I believe this is probably pretty common among beginners.
Other times, it goes into depth that cannot possibly be digested meaningfully by beginners and seems pretty arcane. I desperately tried to understand why one would use lambdas vs. procs for quite some time. They seem to be more or less the same outside of a few differences which I was not able to wrap my mind around. Despite the fact that I did want to learn more, Code Academy pushes you relentlessly forward. In some ways this misses the point. I want to go through the lessons so I understand the coding process, not simply so I can earn badges. I am hoping that as I go through more lessons and begin to code some of my own primitive projects some of this will come to make sense.
It's amazing how much resistance the brain puts up to learning new things once you reach a certain point.
For Reference: 279 points, 35 Badges
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