What follows is a list of the best free code tutorials in my opinion. I’m proposing only the programming tutorials that I found taught me the fastest and the ones I enjoyed participating in.
There are many slow, boring video series I’ve gone through in the hopes of learning to program, but what follows are the programs that I found to teach me the subject quickly and were fun to complete.
Overall Best Free Code Courses
- Free Code Camp – http://freecodecamp.com/ – Free Code Camp is an open source, game-like software course that teaches everything from HTML to computer science ideas like
- CodeFights – https://codefights.com/ – I would suggest this is more of an intermediate way of learning. Once you get good with algorithms, this might be a great way to get on the radar of interesting software engineering companies.
- Codecademy – http://codecademy.com/ – These exercises are the best for getting an initial introduction to any technologies covered on their platform. Also, if I want to revamp some skills quickly before approaching a new project, bashing through Codecademy is a great way for me to freshen up on skills.
Best Specific Code Technologies
JavaScript
JavaScript is a very important language for the internet. If you want to have a good idea of what JavaScript looks like when navigating the web, go to Chrome>Preferences>Content Settings and shift the “Allowed” tab off. Once you’ve turned JavaScript off, go to your favorite websites and see the difference.
NPM
What is NPM? Node Package Manager is a protocol for using JavaScript to build applications. At this point, all I know is that it empowers the programmer to use the terminal to build web applications in JavaScript.
Regular Expressions (RegEx)
What is a regular expression? A RegularExpression is a line of text formatted to get you a result. For example, if you wanted to find all the dollar amounts from a tremendous text document, you can use a regular expression to pull out all the numerical numbers after a “$” symbol.
jQuery
What is jQuery? jQuery is a library of JavaScript which makes using JavaScript easier on web pages. For example, you write a HTML search box into a webpage and you want to process the input from the user to do something. You could use jQuery to take the user information and put it into a JavaScript algorithm.
Learn.jQuery.com – http://try.jquery.com/
SQL
What is SQL? SQL is an acronym for Structured Query Language. Pronounce it, sea quell, rather than S.Q.L. This is a database language for retrieving data and creating data. Note: a basic understanding of RegularExpressions will help before starting the SQL tutorials.
Expample Format
SELECT <something>
FROM <dataset>
WHERE <attributes you care about>
SQL Bolt – https://sqlbolt.com/
Best Free Code Tutorials – Parting Words
I’m no expert at this. In 2016 I spent a year deep diving into software engineering, but I ran into a wall and decided to build a school bus home. That home took me about 9 months to build so I fell off the programming horse during the months from March to November of 2017.
For me, there is still a haze obscuring my path to understanding software engineering. Though the haze has lifted consistently during my studies, I still feel considerably lost in it. The above suggestions were from the tutorials that cleared the haze out the fastest. I’m sure it’s not a complete list, but it is the list of technologies that helped me the most.
Please add any suggestions in the comments below. I would really appreciate learning faster ways to blow the haze away.