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Free Code Camp's Curriculum Philosophy

Our goal is to help campers become job-ready in 1,600 hours. 

We live in a distracting world. We must help our campers stay focused and motivated.

We keep our campers motivated by teaching them only what they need to know, when they need to know it, so they can keep moving forward.

We keep our campers focused by through our tight curriculum of "must know" skills.

- Computer Science fundamentals applicable to modern Web development
- JavaScript
- Databases
- Automated Testing
- Time complexity and Big O Notation
- Git and how to collaborate with GitHub
- How to pair program effectively
- Object Oriented Programming
- Regular expressions
- HTML and CSS
- jQuery and Ajax
- Restful APIs
- Basic Unix commands
- Functional Programming
- DevTools and Debugging
- Client-side JavaScript libraries (either React.js or Angular.js)

"Nice to know" skills belong in our more casual mobile experience:

- Development environment tools (c9.io takes care of this)
- Ops (Heroku takes care of this)
- How to format a code repository (full stack roll-outs like MEAN.js take care of this)
- Computer Science fundamentals not directly applicable to web development (compilers, operating systems, etc.)
- Style considerations
- Time saving tools like CSS preprocessors (LESS), HTML template engines (Jade), build automating systems (Gulp)
- Tools that extend JavaScript or add syntactic sugar(CoffeeScript, TypeScript)
- Common coding interview questions
- Computer security beyond basic libraries
- Hardware


External content:

1) We currently use some external resources in our curriculum. All of these are free, self-paced, browser-based and interactive. We are replacing these as fast as possible with our own content.

2) We also reference documentation directly. Rather than referencing external resources such as videos or blog posts, we distill their contents into as succinct an explanation as possible. Every time we send a camper a way from Free Code Camp, focus is lost.