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You should consider yourself lucky. Learning to program in not so distant past was more difficult than many care to think. You had to purchase heavy, large programming books for any language that you wanted to learn, and most of the time – you also had to join a social circle to progress further.

To be honest, it would be nice to see the social circle thingy make a comeback, otherwise the programming community as a whole is becoming a bit bloated, cluttered to say the least. Real-life programming groups can break the habit of searching on Google for answers, and actually encourage critical thinking.

But, that’s a discussion for some other time. Today, I’m going to go over a couple of popular and known (as well as new and exciting) websites that provide you with the ability to learn web development, and perhaps a few that offer web design courses as well. I don’t guarantee that all of these are free, but I know that they’re reliable and teach you what you want to learn.

Codecademy

Who else, if not Codecademy? Say what you like, but the platform has grown over the years and is starting to mature, and provide one of a kind learning experiences. In case you don’t learn how to code from the courses that Codecademy offers, at least you’ll know how to print ‘Hello World!’ in every programming language for the web. Right?

Code School

It’s not a free platform, but it does provide a very deep learning experience for the many languages and softwares alike. Code School is run by some great programming minds, and you’ll enjoy every course there is to take. They’re interactive, thoughtful and fairly easy to get over with. Try out the free Git course, see the interface + learn Git!

Google University

Google only recently renamed their courses page to ‘University’, but that doesn’t change anything, apart from encouraging users like you and me to submit our own course materials for others to learn from. It sounds like a great marketing strategy to me. 🙂

Either way, they’ve got an extensive course catalog from within which you can learn nearly every aspect of web and mobile development. Good luck.

TheCodePlayer

It is a great concept for a website, and I was happy to learn that the tutorials also include an interactive code editor within the browsers. Makes the whole learning experience much smoother! TheCodePlayer offers tutorials in HTML, CSS and JS. You get to see the final product first, and then you learn how to build it. Great concept, good variety of tutorials.

Team Treehouse

You can tell that the designer behind the Treehouse homepage is quite the pro! Lovely design, I’ve to admit. But, just as lovely are their courses on web development and web design, including a few lessons on mobile development. What I love about Treehouse is their community forum. It’s full of people helping and asking for help, creates a wonderful community effect.

Programmr

Programmr is an online interactive lab for students and enthusiasts to learn, practice and become proficient in programming. At Programmr you can code, compile & run projects right in the browser in almost any language. Code & run command-line programs, web applications, mobile apps, database apps as well as rich media apps right in the browser. It’s a wonderful experience, and has lovely community to support it.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is an educational non-profit focused on providing high-quality education for everyone. They produce a collection of free online micro lectures on a variety of different subjects, including mathematics, history, computer science, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics. Khan Academy also incorporates game mechanics into their system by awarding students with badges for reaching certain skill levels.

It has a great section for those who want to learn more about programming, and computer design. Great maths lessons, btw!

Scratch

You’re never too old for Scratch. You migh be thinking: “Meh, I don’t need this – it’s for children!” When, in fact, it is the same type of routine that you would go through if reading a book. The logical steps required don’t change that much. Scratch lets you see programming for what it is, not for what you might make out of it. Free to signup and learn. Check out the projects that others have built – crazy!

Udemy

The video lectures on this site can range from really great to really bad, but most that I’ve encountered have been quite reasonable, and fairly easy to work with. Udemy gives you access to thousands of video courses submitted by its approved instructors. I’m putting this in the list because a lot of the courses are available for free, especially the material related to entry-level programming. Grab them while they’re hot!

CoderDojo

CoderDojo is an open source, volunteer led movement orientated around running free not-for-profit coding clubs (Dojos) for young people. Since CoderDojo is an open source movement, are different and completely autonomous! Dojos are set up, run by and led by volunteers.

As I said at the beginning of the post, real-life learning is quite important, so we’re wrapping this up with the CoderDojo. It is meant for the younger generation, but nonethless a great project to be a part of.

Finding the Right Place to Learn Programming

It’s always about those difficult first steps, but if we can overcome those – the rest of the journey is going to be much more enjoyable and relaxed. Take any of the websites in this list, and study them thoroughly to see what they’ve actually got to offer. Analyze your own needs and type of products you want to build; then, take action! 🙂

About the author: “Alex has been working with the web for nearly ten years, his experience ranges from single tasks like managing a website, to full blown web development, mostly within his own projects. Find more of his writeups on CodeCondo.”