Learning code isn’t just for programmers any longer – it’s also become a viable asset to lots of other professionals, including writers, educators, graphic designers and social media specialists. Coding can integrate smoothly with a great variety of skills – and even if a skill involving code isn’t your focus, you can still earn some excellent cash freelancing as a coder aside your regular job.
Coding has become a much-prized skill in the quickly growing remote workforce as well, and more and more freelance and remote workers are opting to learn everything from HTML5 to jQuery. Here are five online resources for learning to code.
Codeacademy
Codeacademy is one of the best and most comprehensive online resources for the absolute beginner. Codeacademy offers up training in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and lots of other coding languages. Best of all, it provides integrated interactive learning: when you’re finished reading a lesson, each one broken up into bite-sized chunks, you can type code directly into the interface and see how it behaves in real time.
Codeacademy is one of the best jumping-off points for further development in learning code, so if you’re brand new to coding – or a particular coding language it offers – this is one of the best places to begin.
Skillshare
Skillshare is one of the best and largest online classroom platforms, providing courses in command line programming, UI and UX code, gaming design, games programming, and lots more. Each class is its own short unit, designed to develop and advance your skills at a reasonable pace, and is personalized to your skill level and interests. Skillshare also regularly runs specials where you can get one to as many as four months for free and take unlimited classes, so if you’re looking to deepen beginning skills, Skillshare can serve as an excellent platform for this – once you’re absolutely sure you want to make an investment in learning a specific coding language.
Coursera
Coursera is another well-known and excellent online classroom with thousands of classes offered by university professors. Each and every course is free to take; however, students may opt to pay for a course verification certificate, which range in price from $30 to $100.
Coursera, like Skillshare, is another platform that is excellent to turn to once you’ve decided to invest in further skill development. Even if you do opt to pay for your course verification certificates, it is still significantly cheaper than taking those same classes at a traditional university, and what’s more, you can show those certificates to prospective employers to prove your knowledge. Coursera now also provides paid specialization certifications.
edX
A joint effort overseen by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and partnered by a number of other high profile institutions of higher learning, edX provides over a hundred courses in computer science, including classes in Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, SQL, and many more. edX offers courses for transfer credit and professional certification.
Udemy
Udemy offers a mixture of both paid and free courses that anyone with expertise can design and teach. While you should make it a point to read course reviews before participating – since Udemy courses don’t have to be taught by experts or academics – an excellent selection of courses area available on coding, and you can also pick up online coupons to reduce the cost of your tuition for certain classes.
Even if you have never sat down at a keyboard to write anything other than a letter, an essay, or a research paper, the tremendous variety of online platforms available to learn how to code means that anyone can learn – and, with time and practice, become a coding professional.
