These web offers teach you free programming. Self-tested and enthusiastic: My top coding resources on the web.
Much better known in the USA than in Germany: If you want to improve your job prospects or your salary, learn programming. The future belongs to the somewhat neglected discipline of “coding” – many experts agree on this and already today the demand for programmers clearly exceeds the supply provided by our educational system (unlike, for example, many humanities). Hence my recommendation: If you want to continue your education or are just bored: Learn to code! Today I give you my top coding resources, of which I have been most enthusiastic so far.
If you realize early in the courses that you have a talent for the subject, you should of course finish it up to polished own projects.
Now my top coding resources:
1 Codecademy | online self-running courses for extremely many languages
The Codecademy project is in my opinion one of the best examples for the advancement of the EdTech sector. On the site you can write small programs from start to finish, didactically well designed, and solve problems – the platform works completely in the browser and validates your tasks after completion. As a reward you will be shown the progress and get small ribbons (works amazingly). I learned about Codecademy mainly basics in HTML, Javascript, php and Ruby, because it was the right thing for my job. Especially cool for friends of practical work: There are more and more practical projects, where e.g. the website of airbnb is rebuilt.
Next I will probably look at working with APIs there.
Just how good and important Codecademy is for our society has become clear in the USA for some time now. There, pop stars like will.i.am (Black Eyed Peas) and even President Barack Obama go public with videos to place the importance of the skill “Coding” with the people.
2 Harvard CS50 | Free education from Harvard University (incredible!)
We have arrived at a time when Harvard-level education is free! Harvard University’s Computer Science 50 course starts its lectures every year and puts the interactive tasks to be solved directly online. The team behind the lectures is ingenious and Professor David Mallen is made for the job.
The lecture consists of videos on the one hand: Here you can watch the weekly lectures, which present the topic in a very understandable way. You can also watch the supplementary exercises (which are taught by students). The other part are practical exercises, in which you as a student get to solve programmer problems and projects several times during the course. These exercises are not solved on paper, but in a virtual computer system, which you install on your computer.
The course uses C as the programming language, which is at first a bit unusual to the supposedly modern languages taught at Codecademy. If you don’t want to go directly to the CS50 site, you can also do the course on the MOOC portal edX incl. certification at the end.
3 ExcelVBAIsFun | The YouTube channel for Excel nerds
Very helpful for a business administrator is the programming language VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), which is used in Microsoft Excel. The YouTube channel ExcelVBAIsFun is one of the best resources for learning VBA I have seen so far. The operator Daniel Strong teaches VBA in tutorial videos using simple to complex examples. Charming is also that he makes the whole thing very pragmatic instead of insisting on cumbersome principles.
However, it is recommended to start at least for the basics with one of the previously mentioned courses to understand basics like loops or variables. After that, the VBA functionalities are much easier to understand and the syntax looks simpler.
ExcelVBAIsFun website | YouTube channel
4 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming | Theory in Python
For people who like it a bit more theoretical and frontal, there is also the Computer Science Fundamentals course at MIT. The idea is similar to the Harvard CS50 course, only a little dustier. Prof. John Guttag teaches the basics in a more theoretical and detailed way. The language used is Python.
I’ve only done a few of the lectures, but maybe it strikes a nerve with you.
5 W3Schools.com | Learning Control in Code Editor
If you have completed a course at Codecademy and want to train another weing without doing the whole course again, I can recommend w3schools. The system is similar and the problems are coded and validated in the browser. To validate what you have learned again is a good possibility.
Experience shows that you will spend a lot of time on stackexchange.com or herber.de during the learning process or your first own projects. 😉
My programming skills realistically considered
I would not call myself a programmer. With the resources below, I have brought it to a level that allows me to read code and edit / manipulate existing constructs – a skill that is already positively noticeable in my professional field. That’s why I’m not saying that you should build your own apps from 0 in the near future or develop your own content management system. First of all, I’m saying that it helps a lot to understand code and the process of its creation – a skill that is often neglected in business studies nowadays.
