What can you learn? What can’t you learn, more like!
Codecademy provides an extensive range of tutorials covering HTML, CSS, jQuery
and JavaScript, as well as ‘proper’ programming languages such as PHP, Python
and Ruby.
What’s good about it? Unlike many web-design resources,
Codecademy is free and properly interactive. It remembers your progress, so you
pick up where you left off each time you visit, and it caters for both
beginners and experienced coders who want to brush up on a particular feature.
It’s therefore possible to follow the lessons in order, one by one, or to jump between
them, depending on what you want to learn.
Codecademy has a simple ‘workflow’
structure that helps you concentrate on what you’re doing - with instructions
on the left, a code window in the centre and a preview on the right where you
can see whether your code is doing what it should. There are hints if you get
stuck (although these are occasionally a bit opaque), quick access to each
course’s Q&A Forum for further help and useful glossaries that relate
directly to the language you’re trying to learn. There’s also a free and very
useful iOS app called Codecademy: Hour of Code (bit.ly/codecademy340), which
lets you practice coding on the go.
Who’s it best for? Although it offers some
sophisticated content, Codecademy is of most use to beginners because it
creates easy-to- follow lessons that will have you coding straight away without
getting too tangled up in the theory. It’s a great way to learn the basics - particularly
of HTML and CSS and if
you’ve
ever needed to tweak (or just understand) a bit of embedded YouTube code,
you’ll thank the day you discovered the site.
