Learning to become a web developer is one of the best investments you can make. If you’re a writer, you’ll be able to design every aspect of your blog with total creative control. If you’re in high school or younger, you’ll be able to make as much if not more money than your parents with skills that are in high demand. So instead of being all talk like a word warrior, you’ll become an actual man of money at any age. If you’re a career professional, you’ll add another skill to your set for you to ask for a raise or better: start your own business and begin a new life of freedom.
Learning code is easy if you’re willing to put the time in and invest in yourself: the best investment you can make. Think of all the wasted hours watching TV, and playing video games. There is no return for these activities, so ideally they should have no place in your life. It’s “dead time“—you aren’t actually dead, but you aren’t living your life either. You’re living vicariously through the adventures of another, even if the controller is in your hands. You can become a fully fledged web developer in 4-6 months if you’re able to remove distractions from your life and focus on a brighter future for you.
Online education is becoming a massive industry. People just like you are learning that there isn’t a reason to go to college anymore, and it’s no longer a safe place for men to further their skills. If you go to college your chances of catching a false rape allegation increase dramatically, and you’ll always be looked at as a predator: even if you’re found innocent. Trust me, I’ve had a case against me before. Think about the mattress girl hoax as a real life example of what can happen. You’ll also leave school with debt up to your eyeballs, with no skills to your name. Instead of going to school for a piece of paper, learn actual skills to pay the bills, online. Below are the six best resources to learn coding online.
1. Code Academy
Price: Free | Premium option available
Code academy is the first resource to visit if you want to give coding a run for it’s money. The courses are free and easy to jump right into and begin learning. Instead of video courses, lessons are taught via text, a preferred method to some so that you can learn at your own pace, instead of having to pause and re-watch videos. Think of Code Academy as an interactive textbook. They offer a wide variety of courses in code from html, to JavaScript and SQL.
One downside of code academy is the content is rather shallow compared to the others listed.The premium option does not get you anything except for a few quizzes that won’t increase your knowledge of the subject. Once you finish with the free material, move on to another choice below that will offer you more depth. Code Academy is great for the hobby coder interested in getting their feet wet in a new discipline.
2. Khan Academy
Price: Completely Free Forever
Khan Academy is the brainchild of Sal Khan, who created Khan Academy after tutoring his young cousin in mathematics. His lessons were so helpful other friends and family wanted his tutoring. He took his lessons to YouTube, then grew his following enough to receive funding to create the non-profit Khan Academy.
Khan academy is new to software and coding, the program is still evolving. While Khan is not as good as the for-profit code websites, it still provides a strong starting point for those who are in the early stages of their education. They have the most developed math program of any online resource, and a variety of other subjects including entrepreneurship, economics, and sciences. With over 6,500 videos and growing, you could easily spend a year learning on Khan Academy and emerge significantly better off than your college counterparts.
3. Lynda
Price: $24.99 monthly | Other options available
Ten Day Trial available
Lynda is the best resource for a complete learning platform. Lynda goes beyond coding by offering courses in IT, graphic design, computer aided drafting(CAD), Microsoft office, and almost anything you would want to learn. They include student playlists that can be used to put together courses in any manner you see fit. By grouping courses by themes in playlists, you’ll be able to take the exact courses you want and plot your education your way. Also included are certificates of completion for your records and bragging rights.
Lynda is all video based with some quizzes along the way to gauge your performance. The quizzes aren’t difficult and don’t really offer much, so it’s up to you to watch your progress and determine when you’re ready to proceed. The only downfall of Lynda is that it’s all lectures, videos, and examples, so any application of information learned will need to be executed by you. Even still, Lynda has a course for almost anything you would want to learn and is a mainstay in continued education.
4. Treehouse
Price: $25.00 monthly
Seven day trial available
Treehouse is the best resource to learn code online. They have broken up their courses into tracks based on certain goals you want to achieve. For example, there is a forty hour long track to learn all aspects of web design including graphic design, a forty-five hour long track to learn all aspects of JavaScript, and many others.
Treehouse’s greatest strength comes from it’s learning style of watch, quiz, and execute. After each lesson not only do you take a quiz on what was just taught, the next step is writing the code yourself in an interactive code engine. This allows you to see in real time if your code is correct and how it looks in a visual format.
5. Code Avengers
Dramatic logo.
Price: 29$ a month
Seven day trial available
Code avengers began as a pay per course training program, then switched to a monthly subscription model after having less success than it’s counterparts. They have taken the idea of tracks from Treehouse and implemented them into their own courses.
While Treehouse does have much better teachers and courses, Code Avengers offers certifications of completion that can be used on a social media profile, printed out, or advertised on your LinkedIn account for potential employers. Being able to show completed coursework will go a long way when employers now seek specific skills, instead of over saturated degrees in non technical programs.
Psychology majors I’m writing to you.
6. Code School
Price: 29$ a month
10 free courses available
Code School offers a few brief free courses, then jumps to paid courses after giving you the smallest amount of education. Out of all of the sources listed, code school is the least recommended. Code School doesn’t stand out anywhere specific, and seems to have all the features of Treehouse except not as well polished. Code School is another option you can try to see what program you’re most receptive to. It doesn’t matter which program is best, it matters which program you can use to excel at.
Code School does video courses followed by interactive coding and quizzes. The videos are often spoken quite rapidly, with distracting themes such as as courses taught while on a mountain wearing full ski attire to fit a particular theme. This doesn’t make the course better, and actually becomes a major distraction. The interactive code engine also included bugs that required restarting a thirty minute challenge from scratch. Another bug example I found, I was able to bypass a challenge by pressing the proceed button without having to do any work.
Out of all five sources, Lynda hands down is the best option by far. Lynda is the Netflix of learning with enough content to last you years, and they consistently come out with more every week. If you had only one option to choose from, Lynda would be it. If you took a year off of school, and spent twenty hours a week using Lynda, you’d have a wide array of skills attractive to any employer in a short time.
Online learning is becoming the future of education: Priced thousands less than college, learning at your own time, all skills and no filler, there is unlimited upside to your career and life if you decide to take your education in your own hands and begin learning your way.
Read More: How To Get A Good Education Without Going To College
Since web development is a critical component of how I earn my living, I heartily endorse this article. You don’t even need to learn to write code, to start an online business. You can buy site-building software, and follow the instructions. Whatever you do, be sure to think outside the box. Selling useful inside information is a great way to claim a large chunk of any targeted niche market. (Click image to enlarge.)
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9a128b6a3cedbd48120937950f935ffe27e278857498e43e15b5c83d72b27bf0.jpg
Good point. Depending on what one needs, there are tons of things already templated that includes modification options. Blogging is slready pretty much streamlined.
Indeed. When I got started, I made the conscious decision to use site-design software. It all depends on the person. I can code now, but I rarely use that skill. It’s much easier (and faster) to use software, or as you mentioned, use an existing blogging gizmo like WordPress or what have you. I firmly believe that getting started quickly is the key here, while the desire is still fresh – anything that gets in the way of that, can create major approach/avoidance conflicts.
Yeah, the sweet science of coding is rewarding to a particular kind of mind (my own included ((C++, Java, ActionScript)), but much of it plain unnecessary with the sophisticated, off the shelf products available now.
Ten pages of code for one page of copy (or however many it turns out to be) is not my thing. I admire people who are into it. But there are only so many hours in the day.
Agreed.
Do you work for yourself, mate.
I do, but as a contractor rather than the face of a business
Sweet. Do you work from home.
Not at the moment unfortunately. But I’m less than 30 miles from my current gig, which is a doable daily commute.
Cool. Have you worked for all sorts of companies, as a contractor.
Mostly public sector/local government. These are the institutions that attempt huge wholesale changes, and subsequently the institutions that fuck them up and turn to people like me.
My livelihood is dependent on people getting out their depth and turning to the contract market. They purchase huge, off shelf systems and wonder why they can’t flick a switch to make it work
Ha. I’m familiar with that mindset. I design sites for real estate agents, primarily. You can imagine the scope of their ignorance. Heh. I lease the sites to them, and all decisions are mine to make regarding their overall design. Even though I make this clear, as you are fully aware, I’m quite sure – they still try to tell me how to design them and give me input.
Everybody knows my business better than I do. Everybody knows some “computer genius”, usually a family member. Computers and the Internet are two different things. My favorite line, when confronted with this situation, is to ask the agent, “How much real estate has your computer genius family member sold via online-generated leads?” The answer is always, “Zero.” At which point I tell them to either go have that genius design a site for them, and after they screw it up, and burn up tons of the agent’s money in the process, and it generates zero home sales, get back to me. Either that or stay the fuck out of my business. Works. Every. Time.
I feel the pain pal. I really do.
I’m more system implementation in my day job. Data, structure, business rules v system design. It’s fucking painful, but lucrative. If I can stay at this level for another 10 years, I could retire, maybe.
But yeah, get you. I do
I’m getting a tad burned out on it, as you can tell – heh. Which is why I’m switching to full-time sports betting in 2017, and just maintaining my current clients’ sites.
Ten years and you’re done, huh. You go, man, get through it and get out of it. Sounds like a great plan, my friend.
Haha I’ll try mate. Cheers!!
I was in an 8 hour meeting on Dec 22nd. Should be outlawed by the fucking Geneva Convention that
No shit? Eight-hour dog-and-pony show. “Isn’t management great? Aren’t we smart? Aren’t we efficient? Aren’t we just in total control of all situations?”
Uh, no. No you aren’t.
Heh.
The programme manager asked me if I’d backed up 40 years of company data to my my 1GB USB drive.
I don’t know why I turn up sometimes
Geez brother, I was pissed about the occasional four hour pointless meeting.
It’s enough to make you rip out your own eyes
It’s good to know code if one wants to fine tune their site – I learned code because templates were not around in the mid 1990’s – and I’m talking just html – not css or any dynamic tools used today.
Agreed. I know html and that’s it; I use it when doing something my software can’t handle…
lol. yeah….
If you’re going to self-teach pretty much any programming language, the best resource I’ve ever found is…
programming-motherfucker.com
No, I am not joking. It’s how I taught myself about 5 of the languages I had to use for particular projects in college.
I like the attitude.
Happy New Year fellow ROK’ers. It’s ten minutes before 12.00 am here in Malaysia.
Happy New Year…15 hours and 10 minutes to go here.
Lol how’s the mood over there. You’re from West coast or East coast?
Uh, Southwest USA. Desert area, Arizona. The mood? It’s rainy as fuck and I have a hangover from last night. I don’t drink on New Year’s Eve. That’s for amateurs; I’m a professional. (Heh.)
8 hours here in the UK. First beer opened
Happy New Beer -er, year. 11 hours and 50-odd minutes to go here. Snow on the ground, too!
Umm let me guess bro, you’re either in flyover states or at the East coast. Correct?
My handle is a dead giveaway.
Software Developer here.
Good article, good list. In the past I found Lynda’s stuff to be great. Especially in creating training media.
How fast a web page loads is critical. Probably the most critical element of any website. So if you want people to read what you write, don’t overload your pages with anything that compromises their load time. For example, flash is the kiss of death. So is “pretty”, artistic, header text. (A big custom banner at the top of each page.)
The other critical element is this – don’t confuse your site visitors. They came to your site for a reason. Putting a bunch of links up all over the place, especially at the top – “What I Did on My Summer Vacation”, “Pictures of My Dogs and Kids”, etc. That is the kiss of death.
Whatever the most-frequented portion of your website is, don’t clutter its start page. And make it prominent, on your link menu, all over the site. Don’t clutter the home page either, and keep your links tight, and precise.
Clutter kills. Slow-loading web pages kill. Bind those two around your heart and you’ll be light-years ahead of the average web developer.
Only become a coder to develop and maintain your OWN online business platform. However, this better done by learning to hire an manage qualified coders, freeing your time to develop valuable products and services to sell.
As a 25+ year veteran of the software industry, I’m telling you that coders are a COMMODITY, and you’re competing with competent coders globally who work for peanuts compared to Americans who need at least 50K a year to have an entry-level lifestyle these days.
I was working as a software consultant back in the heady days of the dot-com bubble, watching the tsunami of H1B visas from India flooding the market and taking jobs from very qualified Americans. Every project I booked after 2000 I witnessed management’s thirst for cheap imported coders and other tech talent, thereby increasing supply and diluting salaries. Fortunately by that time I was done with coding and was strictly consulting, making bank while watching the lower-level guys get outsourced. I saw the trend and retired soon thereafter.
Be a coder for your own projects. That’s a great goal. However, if you’re doing it to get a job or freelance for others, realize the marketplace for your skills is a global one, and you’re facing stiff competition unless you’re exceptionally accomplished and experienced in a particular niche. Mine was large financial institutions software systems. YMMV.
This. However, from my experience, H1B workers tend to be FAR more competent and hard-working than the American idiots, these online code academies churn out. The barriers to entry in the field (i.e. Software Engineer and Web Development) have become almost non-existent.
Yup. American’s expectations are way outta line with the realities of the global marketplace. I can’t even hire a sketchy American handyman to fix piddly shit around the house without being raped for hourly rates that rival my lower-priced attorneys. Find a good Mexican on the other hand…
My last software project, before I got out and retired, involved interviewing and hiring for my client, a big 5 accounting firm at the time. I came across a resume of a chick (almost ‘nuf said) who had recently graduated UF with a MIS degree, not a very technical degree, who wanted $80K to start with little more than a years work experience under her belt. In a phone interview she clearly demonstrated her lack of technical competency. However, her one skill was being a social butterfly/party girl. The two cunts (‘nuf said) I was hiring for liked that skill set, and hired her, overlooking a highly qualified geeky, but socially awkward software technician with a solid resume I recommended over her, costing half as much.
As for work ethic, I ran projects in the early 2000’s where I had to continually warn my consultants to stop surfing the web because the client had already caught some of them wasting time. When you’re billing your consultants at $100/hr or more in some cases, you can understand what a problem that was. Today, I can only imagine how little work gets done now with the added constant distraction of smartphones. If I ran a tech company in the 21st century, I’d build a Faraday cage around the office that blocks all the wireless signals coming into the building. And, I’d implement an air-gapped LAN for internal use, providing a limited number of highly restricted and monitored workstations with access to the Internet. If I ran the same shop in India, I’d have no problems instantly firing anyone wasting company time texting, tweeting, and surfing. Try to fire a lazy worker in America and you’re going to have to build your court case before you even approach HR with the problem.
The situation is only worsens. Globalize, diversify, or die. And, never work for or with women!
If you did all those things, then nobody would work for you. What do you mean no surfing the web? You crack me up.
I can sit and stare at the ceiling and be actually working. If you were in the industry as you claim, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Those clients of yours were probably 20th century dinosaurs assholes who didn’t know what they were doing to begin with.
I wouldn’t work for someone like that to pay me in gold. Fucking losers…
If you’re retired, you probably don’t know this, but software development methodologies changed a lot in the last 5 years. Not even that, last couple of years…
I can attest to everything you just said.
Hear ye’ !
HEAR YE’ !!!!
Lol, as if I’d hire you. I guess then there’s no problem, right Slick?
No problem at all boss.
“However, from my experience, H1B workers tend to be FAR more competent and hard-working than the American idiots”
No they’re not. Best engineers I’ve worked with were / are Americans (and Russians, hehe).
If you worked with “Best engineers” from American & Russia, he he he !!! doesn’t mean that H1B workers are not competent and hard-working, you moron !
Tell your observation to Microsoft, Google and other IT GIANTS, so that, instead of “Satya Nadella” and “Sundar Pichai”, they will choose their next CEOs from within “Americans and Russians”, he he he !!! you moron !
“No they’re not”. This clearly shows you have Grudge, you are Jealous and more importantly; you have Inferiority Complex, he he he !!! you moron !
I would reply, but I have to laugh at you for the next 10 minutes first.
If you stood up and clean up a little, you would make more sense. Anyway, I don’t want to make fun of the disabled.
These code academies aren’t churning out “engineers.” We’re talking about two different things.
Excellent ! Finally could find someone who speaks truth, instead of blaming the otherwise competent, hard-working and WELL PAID Professionals (H1B, Students/OPT, etc.). They are not “low-wage”, as claimed by Sanders and other people who have “grudge” and are suffering with Jealousy and, sorry to say; Inferiority Complex.
That said, I don’t agree with the term “American idiots”. I have high respect to the “American Geniuses”, especially in the Information Technology.
Honestly, I wonder how this article made place into the ROK platform !
Harsh, red pill truth. For someone liketo me who akways loved coding
“I’m telling you that coders are a COMMODITY”
Most are, I agree. However when you get into heavy duty stuff, not anymore. I’m talking about mesos, marathon (and their DCOS flavor), elastic search, cassandra, kafka, spark, micro service architecture, all running in the cloud, etc. High volume (terabytes, even petabytes) of data, real time distributed processing, predictive analytics kind of thing.
Then you’re talking 5-10% of developers, even less. And these come at a steep premium.
Financials are a different animal especially HFTs. That’s where you go the other way, as close to the metal as possible. Accomplished C++ developers can come in the 3-400K range. And no, they don’t have little snakes and elephants decorated diplomas from Bangladesh.
Nice list.
If you’re an absolute novice at programming I’d even recommend the language Processing just to get your feet wet. Similar to Java and you can create some nice visual output from their streamlined IDE pretty quickly. Can even be useful for quick prototyping down the line depending on what you’re doing.
https://processing.org/
6 Ways Kratom Can Boost Your Functional Reactive Programming
Man, I didn’t get a picture this time.
The downside to this is that everybody and their dog tries to be a web “developer” thanks to the ease of platforms like WordPress, Drupal, etc. The market is pretty saturated, so you’re not going to make much money at it unless you distinguish yourself in a big way.
Better to learn Perl, C, or other programming languages instead. That’s where the money is in terms of computer engineering.
The good thing about WP is it frustrates you so much you have to learn real code to get things done the way you want. That said, I recently did a site that uses a WP front page, but everything else is raw-coded in php… All just to accommodate a traffic-building plugin that I ended up not using.
That was always the thing that tripped me up when I tried to make a WordPress site. I could never design it exactly how I wanted.
Thanks for these cool resources. I am a complete dope with computers but find coding fascinating. I will def take a look at some of these not for future career development but just to get a better idea than my current one on how computers work. Cool stuff man
I’m that oddity that is a web developer who also does his own design (because I was arty first and also because I believe being a generalist is the way to go), but everything was learned (coding-wise) on a need-it-for-a-particular-feature basis, as opposed to an encyclopaedic approach to coding that would entail learning loads of stuff I would never use. I don’t know how I could have done it all without stackoverflow and W3.schools (and a decades-old grounding in assembly language). John Morris has some great free materials too for php, BUT… get on his mailing list and he will batter you on a daily basis to buy courses that he gets affiliate fees from.
Can anyone tell me what Java, C++ and visual basics are used for?
By the way this article is great and I’m getting to have interest on these sites to learn coding and web development. I believe that my new year resolution is to put a web design and development business.
“I believe that my new year resolution is to put a web design and development business.”
Then you don’t need any of those languages. I’m not sure what you mean when you say development business…
To develop and design websites, why would you say that I don’t need to learn any languages?
You asked about Java, C++, VB. If you only do web design, you don’t need those languages. Java, C++, are not required for web development. C++ is very specialized and I would not recommend it to a beginner anyway. You can do anything in Java but it’s an ocean(it’s huge, and you’ll get overwhelmed). Visual Basic is for Windows Gui applications – I don’t know who’s using that for development anymore these days. VB is late ’90s. Forget about it.
You will be better off learning javascript (and many of its libraries). Look into Facebook React or Angular (this one is a little heavy). As for the back end, node js (kinda javascript for the server) might be the way to go for what you are trying to do. React and Node JS are really good entry points and pretty cool too. HTML and CSS are a must for web design.
All right. Let’s put it in order:
– HTML
– CSS
– React / Angular
– Node JS
– SQL for database access. There.
For web development you need a grounding in php, html, css and some javascript for fancy transitions and modern effects, although some coder snobs will tell you “php is dying” – ignore them, they’re just trying to find something to be arrogant and proud about. C++ and VB are more orientated for desktop applications, the latter for particular use with MS Windows-centric things. Java is not the same as Javascript; it’s a highly criticised C++ spin-off, of no obvious utility in web design.
I like Khan Academy and Code Academy.
Khan Academy have talent of explaining hard concepts into simplistic manner.
Code Academy is good if you want to learn to code and they use repetitive and interactive features.
I haven’t used the rest so I don’t know about them.
All our kids are homeschooled. We use the Kahn academy alll the time for the older kids,good site
I like your tits.
I would be wary of taking a CAD course. Knowing CAD alone does not make you a draftsman, most companies wont hire without some sort of background in engineering or related technical field as well. Its a tool of the trade, but not a trade in of itself.
CAD is good for writing cut programs for water jets, cnc plasma cutters etc. Throw in a hand tool techical ability to sevice ,maintain,ttroubleshoot and repair the machine tool and you are gold. The skill is not the 100k year but will pay well.
I think you’re talking about CAM. Computer Aided Machining like what mechanical engineering do. CAD is technical drawings and blueprints. But you are correct, if you have the technical ability then it’s a good thing to have along side.
The tool we had at the time made cut files directly from auto-Cad 2000 drawings
Well there are a lot of extensions for AutoCAD. The base program is essentially a drawing program. I dont really know much about machining. Been using it for about 20 years. Work in civil / survey.
Very informative article and I have certainly found distance learning to be a useful tool.
A few ones I’ve tried myself: I suggest Codewars, Coderbyte and Euler Project.
You practice to solve problems, rank up and check other people’s solutions.
I was a Lynda member for a few years but problem is they rarely had updated courses on many programming skills such as CSS or JavaScript. Several videos were outdated and covered old technology. I haven’t visited them since their sale but will take another look to see if their videos have recent relevant content.
I use a few of these, however I’d not actually heard of some of them so I’m just about to check them out. I didn’t go to college for a lot of reasons, one of them being that I prefer to learn at my own pace in the comfort of my home. Learning to code is one of the most rewarding things someone can learn to do, and I strongly recommend it, especially to millenials like me, because even if it’s shit pay, (which it really is right at the beginning) it’s work and there’s always demand in the field.