Moscow is a huge metropolis. This means that almost everything is here. Programming courses in Moscow can be found for every taste, but for a beginner, this variety does not make it easier. He has a reasonable question: on what basis to search? Who can be entrusted with their own education? In this article, we will not consider universities as a source of knowledge and skills for a future programmer, but will talk about private courses. About what they are, what are their features and what you should pay attention to when choosing.
Courses can be divided into face-to-face (offline) and online.
Full-time form of education
Paid programming courses
To begin with, consider paid Java courses in Moscow. They involve working in a computer class with a teacher plus doing homework. Typically a student should write 1 to 3 programming problems per week. Everything is about the same as in a university, only the audience is usually smaller and, theoretically, there is more attention to each student.
Location
Everyone who lives in the capital knows that the first question that needs to be clarified is where the programming courses are geographically located, Moscow is big. If you are lucky enough to find a school near where you work or live, then you can look at the following factors. If not... Even serious people sometimes drop out of school after missing classes several times in a row due to two-hour traffic jams.
Visiting schedule
Usually two weekday evenings after work are allocated for classes. Classes last 2-3 hours. Some programming courses in Moscow offer weekend groups. Perhaps this is convenient: the head is fresher, there are fewer traffic jams. However, this option is most often not suitable for family people.
Computer classes
Before starting classes, you need to clarify whether the courses offer computers or whether it is necessary to carry your own laptop. The second option is becoming more and more common. This has its pros and cons. If you already carry your computer with you to work, then you will not experience much discomfort, but if you don’t really want to carry your iron friend with you on the subway, you may need to look for other options.
Teacher
A very important factor! Before you pay for the course, you need to find out:
Teacher qualification. Is he a professional programmer or a technical university teacher who decided to earn some money in the evenings? If he is a programmer, what company does he work for, what does his position sound like (Junior, Middle or Senior Java Developer)? It is desirable that you come across a person who knows the programming industry from the inside, and not from the stories of others.
How busy is the teacher? Will the teacher have assistants or does he work alone. How many groups will this teacher lead at the same time? This is also important. Imagine: there are usually 10-15 people in a group, everyone needs to check their homework. And if the teacher has a lot of such groups? He will not physically be able to carefully study the code of each student.
How long has he been taking these courses? If so, try to find forums and reviews about him: the combination “a good teacher (that is, someone who can explain complex material well) + a good programmer” is very rare. If you happen to find one, consider yourself very lucky.
Price
The number of treasury tickets that you have to pay for programmer courses in Moscow depends primarily on the previous paragraph. That is, from the qualifications and requests of the teacher. A good Middle level programmer earns at least $2,000 a month, feel free to multiply by two if he is a Senior. As you understand, it is not easy to interest such a person in a part-time job. If your teacher is a recent student himself, then the courses will be cheaper, but here's the quality ... However, we won't judge. There are natural born teachers who just love teaching. Such people can earn a lot on their main job, and consider teaching as their hobby.
Training program
Usually one programming course, for example “Java from scratch” lasts 2-3 months, and there are 1-2-3 such courses offered. Two classes per week, 2-3 assignments in the same week. This is about 36 tasks per course - for a novice programmer, this is catastrophically small. Almost any educational company offers programming courses from scratch, in Moscow there are a lot of such courses for beginners. But if you already have some experience, the choice narrows sharply. The reason is the same: there are too few programmers willing to teach. And if courses for beginners are still acceptable for a green teacher or professor of computer science, then this will no longer work with “continuing” ones. In summary, advantages:
Personal communication with a teacher-programmer (if you're lucky);
Equally personal communication with other students;
There is a training program that you can "go to".
Flaws:
You need to spend time on the road to the courses;
A strict schedule that is easy for a working person to fall behind;
Few practical tasks;
Often - high price or low quality courses;
Usually - a high workload of teachers.
Of course, we give only generalized advantages and disadvantages of face-to-face courses. If you are lucky to find courses with a good teacher and a convenient location, the shortcomings are immediately leveled.
Courses / internships at companies
Courses at IT companies are very different from the face-to-face courses that we discussed above. Typically, such courses are unpaid (and sometimes paid) internships. Typically, large IT companies recruit for such courses several times a year. This is very useful, and Moscow residents should keep track of such events. Only now you need to apply for them, and it is not easy to do this, since there are a lot of candidates for each place. And one more important point: such courses are designed for the so-called “experienced beginners”, in fact, almost ready-made Junior Developers without real work experience. Accordingly, such courses usually last six months. They are very complex and require a lot of effort. From the initial group, ⅔ is eliminated by the end. As a result, the best ones can already be hired for a full-time job, for the salary of a "jun". Benefits of corporate courses:
Free;
Teachers are active programmers;
A lot of relevant practice (the one that is needed in modern IT);
Almost real work experience in an IT company;
Chance to get a job in the company.
Disadvantages (for beginners):
To enter the courses, you need to be a near-ready programmer and pass a difficult selection;
Huge workload (often incompatible with the main work);
Form of study: online courses
Group online programming courses
This type of course is not much different from full-time courses. We have the same 2 classes per week at a strictly defined time for three months. Only a group of students and a teacher do not gather in the classroom, but each at their own computer. Everything else is the same. Probably, such courses are preferable for busy Muscovites: at least the problem of wasting time and nerves on the road to the programming school disappears. In addition, these courses can be somewhat cheaper than face-to-face courses, since their organizers do not need to spend money on renting classrooms and buying equipment. There is another option for group online courses. Students do not watch live lectures, but records of webinars, and at a certain time the teacher conducts a series of consultations on theory and homework. Advantages:
No need to waste time and money on the road
Communication with the teacher and other students
Flaws:
Same as face-to-face courses (except for travel time)
Individual online Java courses in Moscow
Such courses are somewhat similar to mentoring, so they are usually expensive. As a rule, you move according to the program compiled by the teacher, listen to the recordings of his lectures, do your homework, get their verification and short personal consultations. A good and flexible option: there is no longer a rigid reference to the time of classes, you watch lectures when it is convenient for you and agree with the teacher about a consultation at a time convenient for you. Advantages:
Personal schedule
"Live" mentor
Flaws:
High price
You can imagine a more budget option, in which one teacher is “shared” by a large number of students. Accordingly, not too much attention is paid to each (it all depends on the responsibility of the author of the courses). Tasks with this approach are very often checked by a simple autovalidator, in worse cases - by comparing with someone else's code on GitHub.
“Platform” Online Courses
The platforms Coursera, Udemy, edX and others contain a huge number of programming courses. There are many free ones among them, recorded by masters of their craft (the same “Harvard CS50. Fundamentals of Programming” in English is on edX, and the CodeGym website has a Russian translation of this most popular course for beginners). On some platforms, there is an approximate schedule for completing courses (most often tasks are divided into weeks) and it is better not to get out of this schedule. Usually such courses consist of videos, additional materials, tests and homework. Sometimes tasks can be verified using simple built-in validators, but more often than not, the correctness of the code cannot be reliably verified. Advantages:
Flexible schedule
Often free or not very expensive
Flaws:
Lack of feedback, which is why students most often drop out of such courses;
The course is divided into 4 blocks (quests), each of which has 10 levels. While taking the course, you, like in a computer game, move from level to level, thereby pumping your knowledge and ability to program. Each level contains several short text lectures, written in the form of a dialogue of highly original characters, as well as many tasks. Only by solving most of the tasks of the level will you score enough points (here they are called “dark matter”) to go further. Each task is provided with a list of requirements, which makes it easier for beginners to understand. Also, the course has built-in automatic verification of solutions and a system of recommendations - a kind of “virtual mentor”. You simply press a button and the solution is sent to the “mentor”. In a moment, a response comes in which you receive information about the correctness of the solution and a list of recommendations, how to fix errors, if any. So, attention: there are more than 1200 such tasks on CodeGym! Their study is the very valuable first programming experience that beginners lack so much. Because of this feature, teachers of face-to-face or online courses often recommend CodeGym as a source of additional tasks. Most of the tasks are quite simple, but starting in the middle of the course, CodeGym offers mini-projects - these are large tasks with step-by-step instructions that help students create their first complex programs. For example, the game 2048 or a restaurant emulator. Depending on the workload of the student and his skills before the start of the course, CodeGym can be completed in 3 months to a year. At the end of the course, you can sign up for an online internship, explore the Java EE technology stack, and create your own project. Those, those looking for courses are often afraid that there is no meaningful feedback in the online environment, which makes serious problems almost intractable. CodeGym has successfully dealt with this problem with the help of the CodeGym community and the "Help" section, where you can ask questions about tasks and theory. Usually students' questions are answered fairly quickly. This is done either by other students or someone from the CodeGym team.
conclusions
Conclusions are up to you! No matter what, we wish you the best programming courses in Moscow or online!
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