Back in fall 2012, I attended Starter League in Chicago for their 3 months Rails bootcamp. Prior to joining the bootcamp, I had experienced with Rails through Michael Hartl tutorial and by participating in different hackathons. Taking part in SL required an appreciable upfront investment from my part: moving from Montreal to Chicago for three months, $6K tuition fee (at the time), leaving my job and not working for the duration of the program. I am extremely happy with the results and I am now working as a lead data analyst and I am coding in different languages (python, javascript) as part of my daily job. One of the upside of a great bootcamp is the streamlined learning process. Jeff Cohen, the instructor at the time at SL, built an incredible curriculum for students, enabling deep understanding of the underlying mechanics of Rails. Furthermore, the immersion is a very interesting aspect of a bootcamp. Every day, you are surrounded by people who left their job and family to learn to code. These people want to change careers, start a tech business etc. This can be very motivating. Tips: Prior to joining a bootcamp, know exactly what you want from it. Do a bunch of tutorials, read books about coding, participate in hackathons and get to a level where you can build stuff with code. Too many people haven't tried much before joining a bootcamp and expect to get miraculously good at coding. It's not the case. Learning to code is hard, know what you are getting into. Also, if you expect to have a dream job on a silver plater at the end of the bootcamp, this probably won't be the case. You'll have to work hard for it and chances you'll have a few more months of learnings necessary prior to a full-time gig that interests you. You can learn to code online. A bootcamp can speed up the learning process and is a great learning experience and good for networking but it is not required to learn to code. Know exactly what you want from a bootcamp.