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Hi karmanaut - actually, believe it or not, I think many people could benefit from learning to code. That doesn't necessarily mean that all humans on the planet earth need to learn, but learning programming can be beneficial to non-programmers and people who don't do this on a regular basis.

For example, I had a student in a class a few sections ago who was a product manager at a large startup company. He was frustrated because he had a lot of trouble telling when his developers really needed extra time and when they may have possibly been pulling the wool over his eyes. After learning about back and front end technologies in our Web Development 100 course, he went back to his job much more confident in his abilities to judge the scope of a project and manage his team more efficiently. He also was able to build personal web application projects that he always wanted to have for himself.

Programming can teach you many things besides just how to build a website or application. It will teach you how to think logically and also how to tackle things with no fear. Many students come in afraid to enter a certain command in the command line for instance. My line is always, "What's the worst that will happen - will your computer explode?" (unless I see them entering sudo rm -rf /, the command to delete your whole computer). Even my students who didn't do something directly related to coding before or after the course seem to come out more confident individuals with a greater understanding of the web and/or technology, which is a huge part of everyone's daily life.

Hope that helps!

Hi BrooklynBound,

Ruby is a programming language. If you've ever heard of C, C++, Python, Java, etc - these are all also programming languages. So they're all a cohesive set of rules and methods that allow you to give instructions to a machine. Ruby is a bit different from other languages though - it was invented by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka "Matz") in the mid-1990s. His goal was to make developers more productive and in the end, more happy.

Rails is as web application development library/framework implemented in Ruby developer primarily by DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), meaning that it's really just a bunch of Ruby code wrapped up into a neat little package for web developers to use. What it brings to the web development community is a set of standards, a convention, to use when developing web applications. Rails espouses "convention over configuration", meaning that it assumes you'll do things a certain way in order to make the development process easier for everyone. This doesn't necessarily mean that Rails is the fastest or most efficient web framework. However, it does mean that it can be incredibly easy to get up and running with a basic, Twitter-like web application for instance, really quickly. A seasoned Rails dev could build a basic version of Twitter in a few minutes. With raw PHP "back in the day", this would have taken much longer. So basically, Rails as a framework is a way to increase developer productivity, built on and using a language that was built for developer happiness.

In summary, what Ruby and Rails bring to the coding/design community is an easy way to get up and running fast with web applications. However, the only pitfall is that some beginners never learn to understand the underlying technology that powers Rails, which is similar across frameworks and stacks. This is why we teach Sinatra first in our classes. Sinatra is a much simpler framework where you can have a web app up and running in literally 4 lines of code. We start from there and teach the basics of web apps including sessions, authentication, http methods, etc and this way our students understand that Rails isn't just magic!

Sorry for the long-windedness, but I hope that answers your question =).

Hi RadiantActive for this question I'd recommend checking out my article on Entrepreneur.com that answers a very similar question, "I'm excited to learn how to code, but there are so many different languages – where do I begin?". Happy to elaborate if you have any follow up questions!

We have a bunch of different options depending on what you're looking to do. I would check out our classes page, which has a detailed breakdown of the cost of each class. Once you click on a class, just look at the information bar on the right/bottom =)

Hi midoman, honestly, I don't think anybody ever truly masters HTML and CSS. The spec is changing all of the time and new technologies like SASS and HTML5 are constantly changing the definition of "mastery"!

However, I'd say that if you've been building websites for 2-3 years and working mostly on the front-end, and not using templates, you'd probably have a pretty darn good understanding of things. Our Front End 101 class provides a lot of the object-oriented JavaScript and element building training you'd need as a solid foundation!