Spend an afternoon brushing up on statistics. Discover how the Krebs cycle works. Learn about the fundamentals of music notation. Get a head start on next semester's geometry fundamentals. Prepare for the SAT, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, NCLEX-RN, and AP exams. Or, if you're feeling particularly adventurous, learn how fire-stick farming changes the landscape of Australia.
Coding games are also a fun way to get your feet wet in programming. If you have an hour to kill, you can give the simple Hour of Code games a try. Additionally, many schools already use the Minecraft: Educational Edition to teach kids programming basics with coding blocks, and even JavaScript. (You can download this version of Minecraft for free if you have an Office 365 Education account.)
That's a great list, Kevin. However, nearly all above-mentioned course/tutorial providers provide content for nearly all programming languages/frameworks. Hence a newbie learner would be confused which learning platform to choose out of the lot. For ex. if one is interested in learning Python, all the above-mentioned platforms provide Python courses/tutorials. To solve this dilemma, Hackr.io (https://hackr.io) is the programming community where learners can find the best online programming courses and tutorials recommended by the community. PS: Sorry for the self-promotion ( Am Hackr co-founder) but I thought of informing the readers about the possible solution.
This Google project for web developers launched in 2010 to counter Apple’s HTML5. The site is full of tutorials, resources and the latest HTML5 updates. It’s open source, so developers can play around with HTML5 code. Because this site's offerings are more advanced than most introductory courses, you'll need some knowledge and experience before jumping in.
Want more one-on-one coaching and career prep without doing a full-time bootcamp? Try signing up for the subscription-model certification courses from Udacity or Treehouse, where you have the opportunity to ask a tutor for help instead of suffering your coding mistakes or questions alone. You can’t do much better than the $19 coding classes from Udemy (even less, when there’s a sale)—even full-time bootcamp and computer science students sign up for these classes to supplement their learning.
As a self-taught programmer, you might also benefit from books that offer broader advice on the profession. You’ll improve your thinking and habits, traits you can apply to any language you decide to learn. Steve McConnell’s 900-page Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction (2nd Edition) is considered the definitive guide for best practices, with data-backed advice on everything from project design to debugging code.
If you want to go pro and become a full-time developer, an intensive and in-person coding bootcamp might help you out, particularly if you learn best in a structured environment with real people to motivate you. However, these types of bootcamps are often the most expensive and time-intensive to attend: You’re looking at upwards of $15,000 for just the tuition, plus living expenses for a few months until you graduate.
Udemy bills itself as an online learning marketplace, hosting 130,000+ user-created courses on all kinds of topics (including over 2,000 coding-related classes). While some of Udemy’s offerings are paid (costing $20-$200 per course), there are plenty of free coding classes as well, including some shorter Tech 101-type courses that teach code for beginners.