Boot.dev has earned a strong reputation for doing one thing unusually well, which is making self paced backend education something you actually want to keep doing. Lane Wagner built it around a simple insight, that most people quit online courses out of boredom rather than difficulty, and the whole platform is engineered against that. You earn XP, you fight boss battles to prove you learned a concept, you keep streaks alive, and there is a genuinely active Discord where people are working through the same material at the same time. It sounds gimmicky written down, and yet it works, and completion is the single hardest problem in self teaching.
The core curriculum is a proper backend path, Python and Go, data structures and algorithms, HTTP, databases, Docker and the rest, and it is taught by getting you to build real things rather than memorise trivia. What brings it into scope here is the newer set of AI focused courses, where you build AI agents and work directly with large language models in code, wiring up tools, handling function calling and constructing something that behaves like a real application rather than a toy chatbot. That is a genuinely valuable and increasingly in demand skill, and Boot.dev teaches it the way it teaches everything else, hands on the keyboard. The honest framing is that this is backend first and AI second, and you should choose it on that basis.
It will not teach you the mathematics of machine learning, it will not make you a data scientist, and it is not trying to. What it will do is make you the kind of developer who can take a model someone else trained and build something solid and deployable around it, which is arguably where a lot of the actual jobs are. The gamification that carries most people along will grate on a minority who find streak pressure stressful rather than motivating, and like any self paced option it rewards discipline and quietly punishes the absence of it, with no cohort or instructor to keep you honest. The monthly cost is fair but accumulates over the months the full path takes.
My view is that Boot.dev is one of the best places to learn to build with AI as opposed to learning about AI, and if that distinction is the one you care about, it is an easy recommendation with clear eyes about what it is not.