Bento: One-Stop Shop for Online-Courses on Web Development

It's merely a few weeks ago, that we brought you a comprehensive overview of 22 of the online learning resources the planet has to offer. Just today we stumbled upon another effort for web designers, developers and programmers. An offering by the name of Bento curates the best learning resources in its field. The collection is community-based and as such more helpful than any Google search result could ever be ;-)

Bento: Different Providers, Different Levels

Bentobox.io (shortened: Bento), created by Jon Chan from NYC, is an interesting approach to the world of online-learning. Instead of offering another variety of courses, Bento simply curates the best already existing learning content from sources all over the web. We have Dash, which we introduced you to just recently, we have Codecademy or Treehouse, which were part of our bigger round-up and we have various others.

Topics are categorized by language, then broken down to skill levels and sorted by resources for beginners, intermediate and advanced learners. The part for advanced learners is quite frequently not populated at this stage of the project. Especially beginners will find more than enough subject matter.

Once you select a topic, Bento will highlight other topics that you should turn to once you're through with your primary choice. Given the plethora of available possibilities, this highlighting might actually help beginners structure their quest for knowledge.

Bento covers just about any web technology there is. I'll happily admit that it covers topic not even I have ever heard of. Around 80 main topics are available, each equipped with at least one helpful learning resource, usually more. If you are into building native mobile apps for the three main operating systems, Bento is a good place to start, too.

If you find valuable resources missing, you are encouraged to add these resources by yourself. Using crowd wisdom is the concept out of which this collection is designed to improve. Collaboration is organized via Github.

Bento is the result of a one-hour hack, if we believe its creator Jon Chan. Established on September 20th it went to the frontpages of the usual suspects, such as Reddit, Hacker News and others within a couple of hours. Chan has written the story down over at his own blog.

Now go help extending Bento or instate your own iteration and see if you can get your own 15 minutes of fame.