Yeah, I adapted them from my JS Anki deck. Also ended up cutting out a lot of stuff out that turned out being less important than I'd thought as a new learner of JS. I'm hoping the courses are more useful than those a learner would create themselves since as a proficient JS user I have a better idea of what skills are actually needed.
Similar to your thoughts, I'd love for this or something similar to eventually replace textbooks. It'd be great to have experts in every field build interactive mastery courses that help you both learn quickly and retain the knowledge long term.
Yeah, I found that in my case I'll boot up in a new language or technology using an Anki deck, then as things start to stick and I am using the new skills in my daily work I'll stop studying the deck.
I've found a few limitations with this approach that I tried to address with SkillPress:
1. When you stop using Anki for any length of time, when you come back you get an avalanche of cards that are due - which can be demoralizing. I solved this by doing away with the 'due cards' UI in favor of the forgetting curve graph. This way you are encouraged to come back weekly to keep your graph green, but you aren't hit in the head with a mountain of cards when you do.
2. When you are first getting started with a technology, you aren't sure what is worth committing to memory, so you'll either add too much or to little detail. With SkillPress the decks are created by someone who is proficient in JavaScript, so the courses are closer to the 80% of the value from 20% of the knowledge sweet spot.
3. In software development you'll often learn a technology and then stop using for a long time because your job or career has moved away from it. With an Anki deck that you haven't studied in months you'll be presented a large pile of cards that you don't know, often showing the more advanced cards first. I solved this by prioritizing cards on both the initial learning and review phases. You can come back to a course any time and SkillPress will try to get you back up to speed starting with the more basic concepts.
The course leans pretty heavily toward active recall - there are a lot of high quality tutorials out there, so I wanted this one to focus more on maximizing retention instead of serving as a gentle introduction.
I agree - the best way to learn to write code is to practice writing code. After you learn the basic terminology the course progresses on to more and more advanced coding problems.