Bootcamps can be intense and fast paced but anyone at any level can succeed in them, especially if they make the commitment and do some prep beforehand which makes the experience a lot less intense so you can focus on the quality of your work versus just keeping up.
Regardless of the length of your particular bootcamp, during that time anything you can take off your plate should be taken off your plate so you can accomodate at least 3 hours for doing homework, practice and research for every 8 hours of class time.
- if your doing 40 hours of class per week, you should expect minimum 15 hours of out of class work per week.
- If your doing 16 hours of class per week, you should expect minimum 6 hours of out of class work per week.
You should hit these amounts regardless of whether you finish any assignments early and use this time to practice and reinforce fundamentals as bootcamps are cumulative and failure to develop your funamentals early on will make later portions of the class feel impossibly difficult, so especially in the early easier portions of the class taking that time absorb and practice will really keep the difficulty day to day quite manageable.
Tips in making this easier:
- Watch the resources in this document before your course starts
- Build friendships and study groups during the course
- Explain things out load to yourself or others
- Comment each line of code so you know what that line of code is doing
Here are the tools that getting familiar with before day 1 will make your life and career quite easier:
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VSCode (this is editor for writing your code)
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Terminal/Shell/Bash (This is the text based interface to interact with your computer, it will be used A LOT especially when pushing your code online for submission and running/testing your code, I can't stress enough the impact knowing your terminal will have on your experience as a developer)
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Browser (Start with Chrome) Frontend development exists in the browser so learning about developer tools in the browser will make testing frontend work much more pleasant and less frustrating. Also some basic understanding of how a browser works will give you context that'll make many concepts more salient.
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Git and Github: Git is software for tracking versions of files, Github/Bitbucket/GitLab are websites where you can push your git repositories to for sharing and collaboration. Knowing how all this works is one of the most important things for any type of development job and also has a high learning curve so start learning soon as you get comfortable with terminal.
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Online Coding Tools: Dealing with all the above tools may not be something you want in the way before you start coding, there are several online websites giving you sandboxes to practice coding in the meantime such Codepen, CodeSandBox, and ReplIt. Highly recommend getting familiar with all three.
You can find video on all the above tools and more, on This Playlist
Your first goal should be HTML/CSS/JS in that order. It takes a lifetime to master these things, but the goal right now is to be familiar with the basics before your cohort and by the end of the cohort be comfortable enough to start looking for entry level work.
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HTML: This determines the structure of content your website, watch
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CSS: Determines the appearance of the elements structures on the HTML page, watch
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Javascript/Typescript: General Programming Language that can be used to orchestrate interactivity on your website (frontend development) or to create servers to handle requests for your website (backend development). Watch
There's plenty more content you can find listed here
Spend sometime getting familiar with the above technologies and tools so that way when they are covered during the course the basics are being reinforced instead of being layed down for the first time which will make absorbtion and application much easier.