While reading books, code and quality articles is, in my opinion, the best way to learn, sometimes I'd rather have some audiovisual content to not spend the whole day reading, to provide more variety. I now have a subscription to egghead.io to hone up my web skills, so after two days of doing a few courses I wanted to write a small review with my initial thoughts.
The courses are short, ranging from ~20 minutes to 1.5 hours, and you can also directly do individual lessons, so the platform feels perfect for blocks of focused training. I won't do individual reviews of each course as else I'd flood the blog with posts, instead doing only this post and then keeping a full list at my reviews page.
Most items almost always go direct to the topic, without any setup instructions, which I like as otherwise you tend to see a dozen times the same "instal X, then Y, then Z" steps. But there are a few (and individual lessons) which do include setup guides, so fear not if you want them.
As for the things that could be better, there are mainly two areas:
In many cases the video is edited to go through the code so quickly that often is hard or impossible to fully follow what the speaker is saying at the same time. It is not always the case, but a general weird decision, I'd expect a slower pacing (and for those impatient the speed modifier is there).
Some courses are a bit outdated: One about testing uses Jest v15.0 (at the time of this writing there's 27.5 and 28.0 is on its way), another about Typescript is based on TS 2.7 and mentions to "the new 3.0 release" (currently at v4.6)... Not a huge deal as much of the content is still valid, though.
To wrap up, this is the list of courses I've done:
- Advanced Typescript Fundamentals
- Async/Await using Typescript [1]
- End to end testing with Google's Puppeteer and Jest
- Practical Advanced Typescript
- Refactor a React application to Typescript
- Testing JavaScript with Jest [2]
- Typescript: Tips and Tricks
- Up and Running with Typescript
Notes:
[1] 90% of the content is non-Typescript specific
[2] 2/3 of the contents consists of an interview with the course author about his test framework, which uses Jest but it is not Jest