FOLLOW YOUR FUCKING DREAMS

Vaea: Let’s work together

Fenris: Go away

Vaea: We have a mabari

Fenris: 👀

Strikeforce #6 (2020)

A mutant: sure what’s it called?

Magneto: the brotherhood of evil mutants

Mutant: w

Cleaning the oceans one step at a time

I’ve said this to my non-techie friends countless times. It’s no secret that being able to code makes you a better job applicant, and a better entrepreneur. Hell, one techie taught a homeless man to code and now that man is making his first mobile application.

Learning to code elevates your professional life, and makes you more knowledgeable about the massive changes taking place in the technology sector that are poised to have an immense influence on human life.

(note: yes I realize that 3/5 of those links were Google projects)

But most folks are intimidated by coding. And it does seem intimidating at first. But peel away the obscurity and the difficulty, and you start to learn that coding, at least at its basic level, is a very manageable, learnable skill.

There are a lot of resources out there to teach you. I’ve found a couple to be particularly successful. Here’s my list of resources for learning to code, sorted by difficulty:

Novice

Never written a line of code before? No worries. Just visit one of these fine resources and follow their high-level tutorials. You won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but don’t worry about it for now:

Dash - by General Assembly

CodeAcademy

w3 Tutorials (start at HTML on the left sidebar and work your way down)

Intermediate

Now that you’ve gone through a handful of basic tutorials, it’s time to learn the fundamentals of actual, real-life coding problems. I’ve found these resources to be solid:

Khan Academy

CodeAcademy - Ruby, Python, PHP

Difficult

If you’re here, you’re capable of building things. You know the primitives. You know the logic control statements. You’re ready to start making real stuff take shape. Here are some different types of resources to turn you from someone who knows how to code, into a full-fledged programmer.

Programming problems

Sometimes, the challenges in programming aren’t how to make a language do a task, but just how to do the task in general. Like how to find an item in a very large, sorted list, without checking each element. Here are some resources for those types of problems

Talentbuddy

TopCoder

Web Applications

If you learned Python, Django is an amazing platform for creating quick-and-easy web applications. I’d highly suggest the tutorial - it’s one of the best I’ve ever used, and you have a web app up and running in less than an hour.

Django Tutorial

I’ve never used Rails, but it’s a very popular and powerful framework for creating web applications using Ruby. I’d suggest going through their guide to start getting down-and-dirty with Rails development.

Rails Guide

If you know PHP, there’s an ocean of good stuff out there for you to learn how to make a full-fledged web application. Frameworks do a lot of work for you, and provide quick and easy guides to get up and running. I’d suggest the following:

Cake PHP Book

Symfony 2 - Get Started

Yii PHP - The Comprehensive Guide

Conclusion

If there’s one point I wanted to get across, it’s that it is easier than ever to learn to code. There are resources on every corner of the internet for potential programmers, and the benefits of learning even just the basics are monumental.

If you know of any additional, great resources that aren’t listed here, please feel free to tweet them to me @boomeyer.

Scratch - scratch is mainly a tool to teach children how to code, but i find it’s great for older beginners as well (i taught my mom how to use it!). it’s a drag-and-drop coding platform, meaning you can learn the structures of programming without having to memorize syntax right away. it’s a great ease-in tool for a beginner! just playing around in scratch is a great way to get familiar with coding concepts.

Snap - a very similar platform to scratch that is geared towards a somewhat older audience. i haven’t used it much, since i teach kids, and i find its interface kind of clunky and un-intuitive compared to scratch, but it has more advanced functionality.

Code Combat - this is an online video game that teaches you to code in python or javascript. it has various difficulty settings, from beginning to advanced. this tool is great if you want to learn how to code, but can’t get yourself really interested in it.

Trinket and Replit - these are online coding platforms, allowing you to write and run code right in your browser. they each have their own advantages (trinket is better for visual programs like games and comes with challenges and tutorials, replit has practical features like autosave and word wrap), but they’re both pretty great! gotta have somewhere to write your code after all, and these are easier than downloading software, especially if you want to be able to return to the same projects on different computers.

additionally, Humble Bundle is CONSTANTLY having coding book bundles up. there will often be really cool and helpful books in even just the $1 tiers of bundles, so i’d recommend keeping an eye out! as of writing this, they have a python machine learning bundle, which while very good on a resume is not something i’d recommend for a beginner, but they have new ones cycle in frequently!

also, to reiterate from op, i cannot tell you how much w3 tutorials helped me when i was first starting out. they are LITERALLY a godsend.