To Learn Coding

10 Free And Best Online Places

 

Bangalore: In February, the tech icons including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill gates, Jack Dorsey and others, in a YouTube video, urged schools around the world to teach coding. The video was part of a nonprofit computer science-education website, Code.org. The entire buzz was to highlight the importance of coding. If you are a coding enthusiast or a professional who want to add some extra coding skills, here’s the list of 10 free and best online resources to learn coding, as compiled by Mashable.

#10 Khan Academy

The site says, “Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.”

Khan Academy was founded by Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The website supplies a free online collection of more than 4,000 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare, medicine, physics, computer science, and a lot other courses. Khan Academy has delivered over 240 million lessons.

#9 Code/Racer

Code Racer was built by the team at Treehouse, where they teach web design and development. They are global, and help anyone around the world who wants to learn coding.

On their website the team stated their motto as, “Our mission is to teach Web Design, Development and iOS to people everywhere, in order to help them achieve their dreams and change the world.”

Code Racer is a multi-player live coding game that teaches newbies how to code a basic website using HTML and CSS, and tests intermediate and advanced users on their coding speed and agility. Players race against each other and the clock to complete coding challenges, unlocking weapons and rewards along the way.

Even if someone has zero experience with building websites, they'll be able to watch a video tutorial and complete the code challenges that will give them the basic skills to launch a web site.

#8 Udacity

The site’s motto says, “Our mission is to bring accessible, affordable, engaging, and highly effective higher education to the world. We believe that higher education is a basic human right, and we seek to empower our students to advance their education and careers.”

Udacity is a private educational organization founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky. According to Thrun, the origin of the name Udacity comes from the company's desire to be "audacious for you, the student".

It is the outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University. As of 4 February 2013, Udacity has 20 active courses. Thrun has stated he hopes half a million students will enroll, after an enrollment of 160,000 students in the predecessor course at Stanford, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and 90,000 students had enrolled in the initial two classes as of March 2012. Udacity was announced at the 2012 Digital Life Design conference.

#7 Mozilla Developer Network

The Mozilla Developer Network is the official Mozilla Foundation website for development documentation of web standards and Mozilla projects. It is a resource-rich collection of documents about web development, made for anyone, from expert programmers to students just starting out. MDN is a wiki, meaning anyone can edit its pages with corrections and updates.

The initial content for the website was provided by DevEdge, for which the Mozilla Foundation was granted a license by AOL. Significant effort has been made to migrate content from mozilla.org. Many pages on mozilla.org now redirect to MDN. The site now contains a mix of content migrated from DevEdge and mozilla.org, as well as original and more up-to-date content. Documentation was also migrated from XULPlanet.com. MDN is a wiki, so anyone can edit its pages with corrections and updates.

#6 Coursera

The site says, “We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.”

Coursera offers courses in engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other areas.

Classes offered on Coursera are designed to help you master the material. When you take one of the classes, you will watch lectures taught by world-class professors, learn at your own pace, test your knowledge, and reinforce concepts through interactive exercises. With Coursera, you'll also join a global community of thousands of students learning alongside you.

#5 Codeacademy

The site says “Codecademy is a team of hackers working hard to build a better way for anyone to teach, and learn, how to code. We're determined to succeed in realizing our mission to turn a world of tech consumers into one of empowered builders.”

Codecademy offers free online coding classes in programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages including HTML and CSS. As of September 2011, the site had over 550,000 users who had completed over six million exercises.

To motivate users to participate, the site offers feedback, badges for completing exercises, as well as a function that keeps track of a user's total score and displays it to others. The site also allows anyone to create and publish a new course using a Course Creator tool. Unlike some of these other online education platforms, Codeacademy focuses solely on teaching coding.

#4 MIT OpenCourseWare

The site’s motto says, “The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.”

MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, partly free and openly available to anyone, anywhere. MIT OpenCourseWare is a large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course materials. The project was announced in October 2002 and uses Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

#3 Learn Python the Hard Way

Learn Python the Hard Way offers free PDFs and if you want to take the video version of the course, you'll need to pay up US $29.

In this context, ‘Hard Way’ means, you can't copy-paste; you must type out each of the lessons in order to teach your hands the language.

#2 The CodePlayer

The site states “Learn HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and more. Video style walkthroughs showing cool stuff being created from scratch”

On The CodePlayer, you can watch interactive presentations that explain how people built things from scratch. Once you become a pro in coding, you can add your own presentations to teach others what you know.

#1 HTML5 Rocks

HTML5 Rocks is a one-stop guide to learning HTML5, contributed by tones of coders who work for big tech companies like Google, Adobe and a bunch of other places. At HTML5 Rocks you'll learn from slides, presentations and videos.

This site contains information on APIs (application programming interface ) that are not part of the W3C HTML5 specification.