There are more coding jobs available today than people to fill them. But most don’t want to go back to school for four years to earn a degree, let alone pay the $200,000 sticker price to get it. So interested applicants tend to choose between two main paths to learn programming: independent study or prep courses.

Bootcamps are a great option because they (usually) require only three months of intense work, teach practical skills required by tech companies, and help people land high paying jobs as developers. Studying independently can also be a good option but there are many potential landmines that could affect the education quality.

Let’s make a list of the pros and cons:

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Self Studying: I’ll make that list tomorrow

While studying on your own is free and you can do it on your own time, an unstructured schedule often leads to procrastination. Without putting money into it, you don’t feel like you have as much of an obligation to do it, or you may not value it at all. You’ll keep putting it off and you won’t feel like you’ve lost anything because you didn’t pay any money towards it. You also won’t know what to study or what you need to know to increase your chance of acceptance into the program.

A student of App Academy’s Bootcamp Prep course, Artem Ipatev, described what it was like trying to learn on his own and found he frustratingly lost a lot of time trying to learn non-relevant material.

I tried studying by myself before and couldn’t do it properly because you are new and you don’t understand what to learn and what to skip. You spend days to understand the piece of new information which you even don’t need