Free Resources to Learn Coding

by David Page, Digital Marketing Consultant at Elfsight — developer of customizable & coding-free website widgets

Photo by Fabian Grohs on Unsplash

Nowadays, every blogger or brand has a personal blog or website. It’s important to have one to communicate with your target audience. Although there are lots of website building solutions on the market, they are still not perfect. To build exactly the website that you want to have, you need more than drag-and-drop software. At least, you should have a basic understanding of coding.

The coding basics include HTML & CSS. These two are pretty easy to learn, especially for native English speakers. After that, you’ll want to proceed to more advanced languages like jQuery, JavaScript, and PHP.

According to Google, there are thousands of free and premium courses available online. It may be tempting to think that you may learn new skills for free, but this approach has its cons:

• too much information that makes it confusing for a novice to navigate through.
• random and disorganized information — novices easily get lost in large amounts of content, approaches, and opinions.
• unreliable sources — all sorts of tutorials and other learning materials can be created by literally everyone which means that they are often not credible.

At the same time, many paid coding-related resources are very costly and not every person can afford it. It’s up to you whether to trust free resources. But if you are good at piecing together scattered information, learning from free resources shouldn’t be a problem for you.

In this article, I’ve gathered a list of free online coding classes, YouTube channels, and blogs. Please, bookmark and share with others!

Online Coding Classes

Khan Academy

In the Computing category, you will find the following subcategories: Computer Programming, Computer Science and Hour of Code. Here’s a list of coding-related courses from these categories:

• Intro to HTML/CSS: Making webpages
• Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation
• Intro to SQL: Querying and managing data
• Advanced JS: Games & Visualizations
• Advanced JS: Natural Simulations
• HTML/JS: Making webpages interactive
• HTML/JS: Making webpages interactive with jQuery
• Drawing with code
• Creating webpages
• Creating SQL databases

Codecademy

You’ve probably heard of Codecademy that many misspell as Code Academy. It’s a perfect place to study Web Development, Programming and Data Science. Here are the links to particular languages: HTML & CSS, Python, JavaScript, Java, SQL, Bash/Shell, Ruby, C++.

freeCodeCamp

freeCodeCamp is a huge programming community providing tutorials, courses, and challenges. Learn HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Databases, Git & GitHub, Node.js, React.js, D3.js and more!

Evanto tuts +

Envato tuts+ is a collection of tutorials and online courses. Code Tutorials section offers thousands of How-To tutorials, 1,220+ video-based courses, and 170+ eBooks to develop your skills.

Codewars

Codewars teaches programming languages through a series of challenges (katas). Upon kata completion, you’ll be shown solutions from the community. With Codewars you can learn Java, Javascript, C#, Ruby, Python, SQL and more!

edX

edX is an open-source higher education program governed by MIT and Harvard. It offers 600+ courses under the “Computer Science and Software Courses” category, teaching various coding languages including Java, C#, Python, and many more.

Coursera

Coursera provides coding-based courses, tutorials, and resources taught by professors at leading universities. You’ll find hundreds of different coding-related courses to choose from. There you’ll find various courses about Python, Java, HTML and CSS, IoT programming and more.

MIT OpenCourseware

MIT offers a handful of introductory programming courses. Here’s a full list:

General Introductions to Programming

• Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python
• Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science
• Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
• Programming for the Puzzled

Language-Specific Courses

• Introduction to Programming in Java
• Introduction to MATLAB Programming
• Introduction to MATLAB
• Introduction to C and C++

Follow-up Courses

• Elements of Software Construction
• Introduction to Algorithms
• The Battlecode Programming Competition

Udemy

Udemy is an education hub that offers thousands of online courses about web development, game development, UX & UI, mobile app development and more. Most of the courses are paid, but there are free courses too! Moreover, Udemy often offers coupons and specials so be sure to subscribe to updates or bookmark your favorite courses so that you don’t miss the opportunity.

w3schools

w3schools offers an impressive variety of courses and languages. HTML & CSS, JavaScript, Server Side languages, Web Building, XML Tutorials, exercises and references. Sounds pretty cool, but there’s that remark in the footer that puts me in doubts: “Tutorials, references, and examples are constantly reviewed to avoid errors, but we cannot warrant full correctness of all content”. I haven’t used w3schools myself but my advice is to search for more reviews to learn if you can trust this resource.

YouTube Channels

LearnCode.academy

Subscribers: 584 439

A great YouTube channel for those who wish to learn JavaScript and webdev. Learn a modern web development skillset with web development tutorials, full courses, tips & tricks. Discover React JS, JavaScript, Angular, Node, jQuery, web dev tutorials for beginners and more!

thenewboston

Subscribers: 2 236 377

4,000+ videos on a range of web and game development and design topics. Bucky Roberts teaches the coding lessons of computer programming for beginners. Explore JavaScript, Django, Git, Python, CSS, Java, iOS, C, C++, game development, MySQL and more.

Derek Banas

Subscribers: 944 504

High-quality educational videos about web development and programming based on community requests. C++, C#, Python, jQuery, Java, XML, HTML & CSS, PHP, WordPress, SQL, and more. The best thing about this is that he finishes all his tutorials so you’ll not get any unfinished tutorials.

ProgrammingKnowledge

Subscribers: 920 505

This one is usually prescribed for those who are new to programming. Discover a wide collection of tutorials for beginners: MySQL, PHP, Python, Node.js, Java, JavaScript, C++, C#, HTML5, CSS and more!

Blogs

David Walsh

A blog run by David Walsh, a senior developer at Mozilla. Multiple authors share their best practices, tutorials, how-tos, demos, advice and insights into front-end technologies, and more. One of the most honest and engaging blogs on the Web.

SitePoint

SitePoint is an online community of web professionals. Learn Web Design & Development with SitePoint tutorials, courses and books — HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP, mobile app development, Responsive Web Design.

A List Apart

A List Apart, which provided readers with regular news from the world of web design, web standards, and web development.

CSS-Tricks

Created by Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks started as a blog about HTML & CSS. Now it’s about front-end tips, tricks, and techniques.

More web design and development blogs in my recent post:

Top 20 Best Web Design & Development Blogs to Follow in 2019

Conclusion

The Net is full of free and premium courses and platforms to learn to code, but I suggest that you carefully research the reviews before signing up. The CMSs and website builders have limited customization opportunities, so you need some coding knowledge to build exactly what you want for your blog or company website. Good luck!

Please, share in the comments if you know any other free resources and I’ll add them to this list!