Is there a course on <insert technology>?

In the Boot.dev Discord server, this question appears now and then. Will there be a Rust course? Why is there no Django course? Can you add a Spring Boot course? Maybe there will be in the future. Maybe not. It’s impossible to cover everything that everyone wants. But that’s no reason to not do the curriculum. Even universities with their 3-4 year degrees only cover a fraction of all there is. Instead, it prepares you to specialize and learn what you want.

Learn on your own

Boot.dev has a similar philosophy as universities in regards to learning. When you have completed the Boot.dev curriculum you should be capable to continue learning on your own. You’ll have a solid foundation to stand on and the skills to continue growing them. The curriculum didn’t teach you about framework X or language Y, but it also doesn’t need to. At this point, nothing is stopping you from going and learning them yourself. You can’t rely on courses forever. You’re a real programmer! You don’t need the same hand-holding as you did when you started.

The journey of learning never stops, not even when you get a job. You’ll learn a lot on the job and you are being paid to solve new problems that the company encounters, possibly problems that none of your colleagues have encountered before.

Learning how to learn

Throughout the curriculum, you will write a lot of code, and even do some projects on your own. What do you do if you don’t understand the explanations in the course? These days, our resident wizard bear/dog/otter Boots, powered by GPT, is very helpful in explaining the task and clearing up any doubts. But sometimes you may have to resort to classic old Google to find other resources. When you venture out to find information on your own you are practicing the art of learning on your own, you have stepped outside the bounds of the course.

Boot.dev aims to explain everything required to complete the exercises. But sometimes you need to hear it explained another way for it to click.

Upon reaching the personal project, learning on your own starts to become important. You are tasked to build something without guidance, taking off your training wheels and forcing you to search for information. Together with the guided projects and the capstone project, this provides a good amount of opportunities to learn on your own. At the end, you hopefully don’t need the training wheels of a guided course anymore.

If, at this point, you are still wondering if there will be a course on something, check out the curriculum plan. All topics with a link exist right now, the rest are planned for sometime in the future (though the plan could change).

If you want some tips on how to learn, check out my blog post about how to learn programming.