I will happily admit to a bias here, because courses like Colt Steele's Web Developer Bootcamp are, in my view, one of the genuinely great things about the modern learning landscape, the idea that a complete beginner can pay less than the cost of a restaurant meal and get access to dozens of hours of carefully structured, well taught instruction that would have cost a fortune not long ago. Steele is the reason this particular course has stayed near the top of Udemy for years, because he is exactly the kind of teacher a nervous beginner needs, calm, clear, unhurried, and good at explaining not just what to type but why it works, and he has the increasingly rare virtue among Udemy instructors of actually going back and refreshing the material over time rather than leaving it to quietly rot as the technologies move on. The path he lays out is broad and coherent, taking you from the absolute basics of HTML and CSS through JavaScript and into full stack territory with Node and databases, and the projects along the way give you the momentum and the small wins that keep people going, so by the end you are not just watching someone else code, you have built things yourself and you believe you can build more. That belief, honestly, is half the battle when you are learning to program, and this course is very good at instilling it.
Now, the obvious point for a site about AI is that this is not an AI course, it teaches web development, and there is no machine learning or modern AI engineering in it, so nobody should buy it expecting to come out able to train models. But I include it deliberately, because the uncomfortable truth that a lot of AI hopefuls skip past is that you cannot do serious AI work without first being able to actually program, and comfortably, and a foundations course this good and this cheap is one of the best ways in the world to get there before you move on to Python and the machine learning stack. The limits are the natural ones for the format, that it is wide rather than deep, so it will make you a capable beginner across a lot of ground but not an expert in any of it, and that being self paced video, it supplies the content but not the discipline, so you have to be the one who keeps showing up without a cohort or deadlines pushing you. The length that makes it such good value can also feel intimidating when you are staring at seventy hours, and inevitably some sections age a little faster than others even with the updates.
None of that changes my overall view, which is that for someone starting from zero who wants an affordable, comprehensive, genuinely well taught first step, this is close to a no brainer, and the value on offer is almost silly. Treat it as what it is, the foundations, get comfortable writing code and thinking like a programmer, and then take that confidence into a dedicated Python and machine learning path when you are ready to point yourself at AI specifically.