Learning to Code: The Best Apps and Services

Whether you’re rich or poor, young or old, busy or have all the time in the world, there’s an app or service that can teach you the critical skill of programming.

By Jordan Minor

A confession: Before joining PCMag, my coding skills were… lacking. It was my biggest shame as a tech enthusiast. Coding is a critical skill these days — whether you’re building a personal website, assembling a professional portfolio, or striving for a promotion at work. Learning to code can be a lonely, confusing, and tedious process, but online learning programs have sprung up to make coding education accessible to everyone, even those with absolutely no coding experience or knowledge. Here’s how to find the best online coding class for you. We’ve even reviewed some apps for kids, too, because it’s never too early to start coding.

Look at the Price Tag

Price is always a concern, no matter what you’re buying. There are subscription-based programs such as Treehouse, Infinite Skills, CodeHS, Code School, and Learnable, which offer access to all classes in the course catalog for a monthly or annual fee. Check to see if the program lets you pause your membership, which is helpful if you want to save your progress without racking up fees while you’re away on a trip or too busy to access the classes.

The à la carte model, such as that offered by Code Avengers, makes sense if you would rather just pay per course. Courses at Code Avengers start at $21 each, but many of the introductory classes are offered for free. You can also pay one price to access all of the courses in the catalog. When you pay for a quality coding program, you gain access to a library of classes that’s bigger, more complex, better produced, and more geared toward professionals compared to free offerings. It’s a valuable investment.

Lynda.com and Udemy feature classes on every topic under the sun, as do similar general education services not featured here such as Coursera and edX, and there are more than enough coding options to make a subscription or individual purchase worthwhile. But if all you care about is coding, you might be better served by a program specifically tailored to your needs, especially if you’re willing to pay.

Codecademy, on the other hand, offers all of its courses and materials for free, along with built-in tools for writing and testing coding skills. Google also offers two courses for developers with some coding experience as part of Google for Education, but you’ll have to set up your free tools separately. And programs like Free Code Camp, Crunchzilla, General Assembly Dash, and Khan Academy all carve out their own niche in the free coding-class landscape, too. Paid classes generally offer more in the way of course depth, breadth, and presentation, but if you’re determined and resourceful, you may find that free classes are sufficient for your needs.

Variety of Courses Offered

Another thing to consider is how many courses are offered and the variety of topics covered. Some offer straight HTML, CSS, and other Web technologies, while others offer classes in advanced languages like Python and C++, mobile app and video game development, and working with APIs. In terms of sheer number of courses, paid classes usually have the edge over free ones. But a huge library can also be overwhelming, so starting off with a smaller, more-focused program is also a good option.

Course format is worth paying attention to as well. All you really need to code is a functional text editor, and all of these programs feature one of those. Depending on your learning style, you might appreciate the more-polished video tutorials of services like Khan Academy and CodeHS.

Ease of Getting Started

If you’re a beginner, you need a program that’s easy to dive into and keep up with as the material becomes more complex. You’ll also need encouragement to keep you going. Most of these services offer badges or other rewards when you hit milestones, and show your progress on your dashboard. The best services offer quizzes and challenges so you can test your skills. Testing isn’t just for beginners — even experienced programmers want feedback on how they are doing. Newer programs also like to treat progress like a game, rewarding students with shiny badges as they level up their skills. You won’t find these features in all programs, though.

However, if you’re serious about pursuing coding as a career, eventually you’ll need to ditch the easy stuff and take on some more-challenging material. Free programs such as Crunchzilla and General Assembly Dash tend to be somewhat limited, so consider switching to a paid program like Code School to continue your coding education. Free Code Camp will even let you take the knowledge you’ve learned and use it to help a real-life nonprofit organization.

Something for the Kids

If you’re a parent or teacher, getting kids to code also makes sense. Programming teaches kids to think logically, develops problem solving skills, and improves how they interact with technology. And it can prepare them for the workforce of tomorrow. CodeHS has special features educators can use in the classroom and a wonderful sandbox mode that students can use to express their coding creativity.

Other programs like Code Combat, Hopscotch, Scratch, Move the Turtle, and Daisy the Dinosaur treat coding more like a video game, so kids will definitely stay interested. Or why not get them a program specifically for making video games? Youth Digital’s $250 tutorials are pricey, but the lessons are robust and teach kids how to make everything from 3D platformers to 2D sidescrollers to animated movies to Minecraft mods. I’m not sure how many kids these days are into text adventures, but Twine and Inform 7 are both free tools for creating story-heavy interactive fiction games. Learning Twine is quick and easy, while Inform 7 is trickier but has more to offer. Coding is just another way to make cool things they can show off, which means kids of any age can learn to code. We’ve listed several kid-friendly coding classes in their own section below. And if you’re an educator interested in other ways technology can help your school, check out our list of the best learning management systems.

Help and Support

Finally, you need help when you get stuck on an exercise or a quiz. We like services such as Treehouse and Codecademy, which offer active student forums to help you work through problems and get a second eye on long blocks of code. Support for bugs and website problems, which most of these services offer in some way, is also key. Some communities encourage you to create a GitHub account, so you can easily collaborate on code with fellow students. While Lynda and Khan are excellent generalist services, they can’t offer this level of coding-specific help and support.

All of these considerations depend on your level of skill. You may not need a lot of handholding, in which case you can download eBooks and teach yourself by signing up with Learnable, or you can dive right into a new language with Google for Education. Most beginners will feel more comfortable with services like General Assembly Dash that start at the basics and test your knowledge as you progress through the course material. Luckily all of these services offer a free or low-cost trial; some even offer completely free coursework.

So go ahead and click the links below to read our reviews and start coding! And if you have your own thoughts on coding education, why not leave a comment? Our general coding classes are listed first, and our coding apps and services for kids are at the end.

Coding for Everyone

Lynda.com
$25 per month
Lynda.com features a variety of courses for those trying to pick up some new coding skills. Hundreds of courses and tens of thousands of video tutorials cover Web development and design topics for beginners and experts alike. Read the full review.

Codecademy
Free
Codecademy is a lot of fun—it often feels more like a game than a classroom, and newbies will be able to get plenty of help as they learn. Read the full review.

Khan Academy
Free
Khan Academy’s programming classes teach you languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for creating websites or designing games. Computer Science lessons cover important topics like data encryption and information theory. The Hour of Code tutorials are especially convenient since they boil lessons down into easily digestible one-hour chunks, perfect for busy adults or impatient children. Read the full review ››

Treehouse
Starts at $25 per month
Fun and easy to use, Treehouse is a great choice for those new to coding, with its engaging lessons and challenges, Monthly costs will add up, though. Read the full review.

CodeHS
$25 per month
Whether you choose to pay for it or not, CodeHS is a great place to start your coding education and a great tool for schools to integrate into their curricula, too. Read the full review.

Code School
$29 per month
If you’re willing to pay to take your coding education to the next level, Code School is an excellent choice. It has a deep, extensive library of video courses, and its screencast shows offer insight from industry professionals. Read the full review.

Free Code Camp
Free
Free Code Camp offers a wealth of coding lessons along with opportunities for actually applying those lessons in the real world. Read the full review.

Inform 7
Free
If you care about the genre, and are willing to spend the time learning the programming language, Inform 7 is an excellent tool for creating and publishing full-fledged text-adventure games. Read the full review.

Twine
Free
Twine is by far the easiest and most accessible game-development tool you can use—as long as the games you want to develop are text adventures. Read the full review.

General Assembly Dash
Free
Its content is finite, but General Assembly Dash provides a strong introduction to the world of Web development with in-depth courses and real-world challenge scenarios. Read the full review.

Learnable
$15 per month
Learnable is unique in that it offers eBooks as well as online classes about coding, but some of its instructions could use a little flair. Read the full review.

Code Avengers
Starting at $21 per course; free courses also available
While Code Avengers offers fewer classes than competitors, those classes are high quality, and the curriculum is constantly being updated. Read the full review.

Google for Education
Free
Google’s coding classes are meant for developers with some experience, and its instructors offer engaging lessons. However, the courses aren’t as much fun as programs geared towards beginners. Read the full review.

Udemy
Free
Udemy offers free and paid comprehensive lessons for building impressive, professional-looking websites in a relatively short amount of time. Many provide dozens of lectures and hours of footage you can access on your mobile device. Read the full review.

Crunchzilla
Free
Crunchzilla offers valuable coding lessons, but its content is limited and buried beneath a tedious interface and dull presentation. Read the full review.

Infinite Skills
$25 per month
Infinite Skills offers hundreds of quality courses, but its recent merger with O’Reilly Media led to confusing website navigation. Help resources are also limited. Read the full review.

Coding for Kids

Scratch by MIT Media Lab
Free
Kids can use Scratch, a full-blown Web application (which can also be installed locally on Windows machines), to create elaborate programs. Elements such as variables, conditions, and loops are offered as puzzle pieces that kids snap together to write code. Kids can share their creations with anyone and check out what other people have made. Your child’s imagination is the limit on what she or he builds. Read the full review.

Youth Digital
$249 per course
Youth Digital is pricey, but it’s a fun and substantial set of computer science courses for children, including game design, animation, and programming. Read the full review.

Hopscotch (for iPad)
Free
Teaching kids programming can be difficult, but Hopscotch smooths the way with its kid-friendly interface and pre-built blocks. Unlike some of the other kid-coding apps out there, Hopscotch is open-ended and encourages kids to come up with their own projects. Read the full review.

Code Combat
Free
Code Combat uses the trusty parenting trick of turning hard work into a fun game. Its lessons might not be as applicable to real-world scenarios as traditional coding educational software, but Code Combat’s free RPG adventures do a great job of tricking children into learning the basics of coding. Read the full review.

Move the Turtle (for iPad)
$2.99
While ostensibly for kids ages nine and up, there’s no reason kids as young as five or six won’t enjoy learning to code with the Move the Turtle app. The app brings memories of LOGO to iOS as kids enter commands to move the turtle through a puzzle or draw pictures on the screen. Move the Turtle brings coding fun to the youngest ages without severely restricting what they can do, or dumbing things down. Read the full review.

Daisy the Dinosaur (for iPad)
Free
Daisy the Dinosaur is an iPad app for the youngest kids, even as young as four. Kids make Daisy, the cute green dinosaur who lends the app her name, move across the screen, jump, change size, or just spin around. The app is limited in what kids can do, but it’s still a good introduction to programming. Read the full review.

Molly K. McLaughlin and Fahmida Y. Rashid contributed to this story.

Read more: PCMag contributor Will Fenton has the scoop on all things educational technology.

Originally published at www.pcmag.com.