Our Favorite (Free!) Coding Tutorials

The Odin Project

The Odin Project is a relatively new site that is free, useful and interesting. It is laid out very clearly with every student starting with the Foundations course which covers:

• • setting up a development environment and GIT
  • Front end – HTML and CSS Basics
  • JavaScript
  • Introduction to the back end and frameworks

Then it offers two paths:

• Full Stack Ruby on Rails
• Full Stack JavaScript

The one negative is is pulls freely from other sources so the teaching tone, method and level varies.  However, all of the sources that I looked at were solid and often ones I have used myself.  They even use FreeCodeCamp!

The best thing about it is that in addition to teaching useful skills, it also has tutorials on learning what a web developer does  and advice on how to get hired at the end.  It also keeps track of your progress for you and has a community on Discord which is very helpful if you get stuck.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy has two things going for it – it’s free and you can set up classes to organize your students and see their progress.  Plus, it is well laid out and easy to follow.  They have classes in the following subjects:

• Intro to Javascript: Drawing and Animation
• Advanced JavaScript: Games and Visualizations & Natural Simulations
• HTML/CSS: Making webpages
• HTML/JavaScript: Making webpages interactive
• Intro to SQL: Querying and Managing Databases

Plus they have classes in math ranging from Kindergarten up to Differential Equations.

FreeCodeCamp

freeCodeCamp isn’t really targeted at kids but they cover all the basics and layout your path clearly which is half the battle. And as you have to pay for more tutorial sites that used to be free – this is a truly great resource. 

They do save your progress and have the following paths:

• Responsive Web Design
• JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures
• Front End Development – this covers all sorts of cool technologies for interactive web apps – BootStrap, jQuery, SASS, React, and Redux.
• Data Visualization
• APIs and Microservices
• Scientific Computer with Python
• Data Analysis with Python
• Information Security
• Machine Learning with Python

They also have a forum which is very friendly to beginners in case you get stuck!

w3schools.com

This is a great resource for developers – I use it all the time when I forget a bit of syntax or how to do something in one of my many programming languages.  They cover so much – HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, SASS, JavaScript, jQuery, React, SQL, PHP, ASP, Node.js, Python, Java, C++, C#, R, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, XML and more..more..more.

They have several areas:

• Tutorials – while not a proper course they do arrange the material in a logical order to learn and provide lots of interactive code examples.
• References – straightforward listing of the various components.  I find these useful for trying to figure out the best way to do something. If you don’t know the capability exists – how would you use it?
• Examples: easy to access examples for different parts of each language
• Exercises quizzes you on what you know – you can even get certificates.

They also have a courses section – which you do have to pay for but the prices are quite reasonable!

Looking for yet more options?  Check out this post for more.