I moved to a rural part of Japan six years ago with no prospects. There was no job waiting for me and I didn’t have a college degree to help me become employed. My Japanese speaking skills were nonexistent unless you want to give me credit for mistakenly asking people if I could “have” their toilet. I knew I needed to figure out a way to earn a living.
I tried several ideas that all failed. The most notable of the failures was the month I tried to sell Japanese Transformers on eBay. I probably would have done better if I made an eBook “How to Make Money Selling Japanese Transformers”. You really can make money but not much…just enough to purchase expired sushi and paper towels. The towels are important because they will be used to clean up any sushi that is “returned to sender”. Ewwww!…but true.
How did I escape financial ruin? How did I go from being dirt poor to just poor? The answer is online tutorial and training videos. I had computer skills but needed to improve them so I signed up for the free trial at Lynda.com and watched as many videos as I could. I was also learning from YouTube, forums, and by dissecting source code. The way I went about acquiring skills wasn’t ideal. I think the learning online thing would have worked better for me if everything I needed to know was in one place. This is why I was very happy when Faye, the community manager at Treehouse contacted me.
Treehouse is taking a new angle at the traditional online teaching video. Their videos tend to run as a course with quizzes and interactive Code Challenges mixed in. As you complete the courses you will earn badges that are an indicator of what skills you currently possess. These badges are then viewable by anyone including recruiters from big companies. This means that everything you need to know will finally be in one place!
The Treehouse course called Websites covers the latest HTML, CSS, and Javascript. There is something for everybody with beginner, intermediate, and advanced level projects. Learn how to build an interactive website using jQuery and Javascript. Take your responsive web design skills to another level by modifying the code of a pre-existing website so that it works beautifully on tablets and phones. Another part of the course is the project on how to build your very own WordPress Theme which is a very marketable skill.
HTML5 Mobile Web Applications is part of the bonus content on the site. This series teaches you how to build a mobile HTML5 web app that will work across multiple devices, using canvas, localStorage and video.
Treehouse recently expanded into print with the release of their first two books in the Treehouse Series: HTML5 Foundations by Matt West and CSS3 Foundations by Ian Lunn. HTML5 Foundations is an in-depth guide to HTML5 which will introduce you to the basics of HTML5, including how to format text, add scripts to pages, and use HTML5 for audio and video. It also covers hypermedia, CSS and JavaScript, embedding video, and geolocation.
I had the chance to dive into Treehouse with a free Gold membership I was provided. The training videos are first-rate and you will really learn what is being taught. The only criticism I have is that some of the stages are not complete at this time. They are scheduled to be finished in the next few months which you can follow on their content roadmap page.
I am giving away an annual Gold subscription to Treehouse which means that one of you will get the chance to use the extensive Treehouse library of step-by-step video courses and training exercises for a whole year. It’s $490 value. So how do you win? Be the first to tell me all 5 alliterative names on the Treehouse about page. You have to be the first person to post your answer in the comments section of this blog post. Please note that all hyphenated names are not being accepted. Your name can be hyphenated because I love and appreciate hyphens except when they are in domain names.
Update: The giveaway has been completed. Congratulations to Danny for winning the annual Gold subscription to Treehouse!
Source: HTML5Blog