Which Los Angeles Coding Bootcamp is Best for You?

Table of Contents

• Coding Dojo
• General Assembly
• LearningFuze
• Hack Reactor
• Sabio.la
• Codesmith
• Beach Coders Academy
• CodeClub
• Orange County Code School

Move over tinsel town and make some space in the greater Los Angeles area for some of the finest coding programs in the country. While LA once paled in comparison to San Francisco when it came to the sheer quantity of bootcamps, we've seen a surge in LA coding bootcamps this year. There is a wide choice of code schools with campuses in LA's "Silicon Beach" that all bring a unique take on web development training.

These schools are helping to support LA’s eclectic collection of tech startups. Los Angeles is home of Burner, which makes an app for those  looking to keep their phone number private, Cargomatic which is essentially the Uber of trucking services, Acorns, an app that makes micro stock purchases for users, Little Labs, an outfit that designs apps for smart watches and many other prosperous startups.

Between LA’s revitalized downtown area, and Silicon Beach which hosts Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, BuzzFeed, AOL, EdgeCast Networks, and MySpace, companies both big and small are taking up shop and will need a steady supply of developers to keep them afloat. Here are the schools trying to meet that demand.

Coding Dojo

Coding Dojo was founded in 2012 and has other locations in Silicon Valley and Seattle. They are the newest member of the LA bootcamp family having only opened its door in the area in August 2015. They currently are running their three-stack bootcamps, as well as Dev Accelerators in MEAN, LAMP and Ruby out of their LA campus. Students in the area may also sign up for their hybrid program which consists of online modules, mentoring and up to four weeks on campus.  Their web development 12-week coding bootcamp costs $12,500.

Joshua Huang left this review on Course Report about his experience at Coding Dojo:

“Coding Dojo was one of the best investments that I had ever made. I come from a marketing background and was looking for a career switch into web development. After finding out about coding bootcamps and doing some research, I found Coding Dojo to be the perfect fit for me, especially as a person coming from no background in computer science.”

General Assembly

General Assembly(GA) can be found in most major metro areas and LA is no different. Their unique brand of continued education courses in the fields of web development, design, data science, marketing and more creates an excellent space for starting a new career, expanding an existing one and establishing a healthy professional network.  GA has plenty of night, weekend, part-time and full-time courses to chose from. At their LA campus they are currently offering 8-10 week immersive courses in product management for $10,500 and web development for $11,500.

Carlye Cunniff  left this review on Course Report about her experience at GA:

I loved my experience at GA. My instructors were invested, knowledgeable and genuinely cared about sending us into the working world prepared. The instructors are constantly iterating on the curriculum, based on student feedback, and market-specific research.

LearningFuze

LearningFuze is one of LA's longest running bootcamp programs, beginning operations in 2011 and starting full-length bootcamps in 2014. Their 12-week bootcamp curriculum includes HTML5, CSS3, MySQL, Firebase, PHP, Git/GitHub, Bootstrap, AngularJS, JavaScript, and jQuery.  The student to teacher ratio is 5:1, and they have a 95% post-graduation hiring rate through their included job placement program. The standard tuition for their full-time full-stack web development bootcamp is $12,995 with early registration and up-front payment discounts are available.  Course Report is currently offering a $500 scholarship to new applicants, and student loans are available which can be used to pay for the program and for living expenses.  They also offer a part-time intro course which runs outside of normal working hours.

Trevor L. had this to say in his review of LearningFuze:

"The curriculum itself is extremely comprehensive and well put together... they give you the tools and knowledge to be able to leave their school and still be able to learn, problem solve and grow as a developer... After about 2 weeks applying for jobs, I got an interview. I was hired the same day. The preparation and knowledge I got from LearningFuze was invaluable... LearningFuze was the best decision I ever made for myself and my career... I highly recommend researching the LearningFuze website and take the leap and enroll. It will change your life."

Hack Reactor

This branch of Hack Reactor was originally called MakerSquare. The Austin-born coding bootcamp was then acquired by Hack Reactor in January of 2015 and rebranded as Hack Reactor. Hack Reactor runs a full-stack JavaScript MEAN stack based curriculum. The LA campus has a firm employer network in place with many graduates of Hack Reactor's Austin and San Francisco programs having already found employment in the LA area at some highly renowned organizations including NASA, Google, Boeing, and The Getty.  The tuition on their LA full-stack immersive program is $17,980.

Here’s an excerpt from Jeff Lou’s review of MakerSquare from our review section:

“I expected to learn a lot about web development and software engineering from MakerSquare.  My expectations were exceeded; each week at MakerSquare as a student was filled with new concepts and technologies.”

Sabio.la

Sabio has been been chiseling away at the deficit of women and minorities in the tech field since they opened their doors in 2012. They are an official White House Tech Hire partner. Their curriculum is career focused providing education in front-end development with JavaScript and Angular and back-end development in PHP, Python, Ruby or C#/.Net. Sabio’s program doesn’t end after the intensive 12-week weekday or 20-week weekend programs conclude. They provide professional development training and mentoring for up to five years after graduation. The tuition for Sabio is $10,000. Course Report is currently offering a $500 scholarship for new applicants to Sabio.

Gema Ramila had this to say about her experience at Sabio:

“There are not enough words to describe how truly grateful I am for what I received from my experience at Sabio. My time there was not easy but it was absolutely worth doing all over again.”

Codesmith

Another new-comer to the greater Los Angeles area is Codersmith a 12-week JavaScript centered full-stack program. They are located amongst Google, Yahoo, and other tech giants at the Playa Vista campus in LA. Their curriculum covers the essentials of computer science, front-end development with ReactJS, back-end development with node and express, as well as mobile development and test driven development(TDD). Codesmith tuition is $16,800.

Here’s an excerpt from a review left by a former student of Codesmith on Course Report:

“Before entering codesmith I was barely understanding closures and callbacks and I didn't even know what a hash function was or what it could be used for.  Now I'm deploying a full stack application to Heroku and using a hash function in conjunction with a database to implement my own authentication!  It's an amazing feeling!”

Beach Coders Academy

Located in LA’s beach city of El Segundo, Beach Coders Academy offers a four-week accelerator program in front-end development. Their “Code Ramp” intensive program consists of four modules. The first covers fundamental front-end development with HTML and CSS. The second covers JavaScript and jQuery. The final two cover more advanced object oriented programming concepts and popular web APIs. Beach Coders Academy also has a four week corporate training program called “Augmented HR”, that follows the same curriculum. Their CodeRamp web dev immersive is $1,777.

CodeClub

Code Club is the sister program of Sabio. Its a nine-month technical accelerator is an intensive nine-month long program designed for professionals with little to no programming experience. The length of this program puts it in an exclusive class amongst coding bootcamps. While many people are weary about the idea that three months of training will prepare you to be a front-end developer there is little to no doubt that a nine-month program where cohorts meet five days a week, eight hours a day will get you there.

Orange County Code School

Orange County Code School is a 12 week full-stack immersive bootcamp located in Irvine, California. Their curriculum is JavaScript focused. Students will have 540 hours of training in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, jQuery, AngularJS, Git, and mongoDB. They boast a 100% hiring rate and feature employers such as CoreLogic, SendGrid, Allergen and SpaceX.

Here is an excerpt from one review of Orange County Code School left on Course Report:

“I had no prior experience with coding before I attended OCCS, so I didn't know what to expect. The instructor, Ron, provided books and other tools to assure the students to learn how to code.  Ron has 15+ years of experience and the knowledge, so I felt comfortable knowing I'm being taught by an expert.”