There was a time when knowing how to program was for the geekiest of
geeks. That’s not exactly the case today. As most entrepreneurs,
freelancers and marketers will tell you, learning how to program can help
you succeed. Over the past year, I've been learning to code. It's helped
me to become a much better entrepreneur --
TO GET FREE MONEY TO START YOUR BUSINESS
I can dive in when my team
needs to fix a few bugs on the site.
You don’t even need to shell out a ton of money or put yourself in debt
to learn how to code, either. These 12 places offer coding courses for
free:
1. CodeAcademy
One of the most popular free places to learn coding is CodeAcademy. In fact, more
than 24 million people have already learned how to code through this educational
company’s engaging experience. At CodeAcademy, you can dive right in and take
courses that teach you everything from HTML & CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Python and Ruby.
2. Coursera
Founded in 2012, Coursera has
grown into a major for-profit educational-technology company that has offered
more than 1,000 courses from 119 institutions. While you can pay for certain
programs to receive a certificate, there are a number of free introductory
programming courses in various specializations from universities such as the
University of Washington, Stanford, the University of Toronto and
Vanderbilt.
3. edX
EdX is another leading online-learning platform that is open source
instead of for-profit. It was founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012, so
you know that you’ll learn about cutting-edge technologies and theories. Today,
edX includes 60 schools. You probably can’t go wrong with the free Introduction to Computer
Science from Harvard University.
4. Udemy
Founded in 2010, Udemy is
an online learning platform that can be used as a way to improve or learn job
skills. While there are courses you have to pay for, there are plenty of free
programming courses, which are taught via video lessons, such as Programming for Entrepreneurs -
HTML & CSS or Introduction to Python
Programming.
5. aGupieWare
AGupieWare is an
independent app developer that surveyed computer-science programs from some of
the leading institutions in the U.S. It then created a similar curriculum based
on the free courses offered by Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon,
Berkeley and Columbia. The program was then broken into 15 courses: three
introductory classes, seven core classes and five electives.
While you won’t actually receive credit, it’s a perfect introductory
program for prospective computer programmers.
6. GitHub
Sometimes, you need to recall a reference book when you’re stuck on a
problem. That's GitHub. You can find more than 500 free programming books that
cover more than 80 different programming languages on the popular web-based Git
repository hosting service, which means that it’s frequently updated by
collaborators.
If you’ve already learned the basics, and went to get into something a
bit heavier -- such as exploring the theory behind coding -- take
advantage of MIT’s free courseware site that includes classes such as Introduction to Computer
Science and Programming, Introduction to Programming in
Java and Practical Programming in C.
8. Hack.pledge()
This is a community of developers, which include some
high-profile developers such as Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent.
There, you can perfect your programming skills by learning from some of the
leading developers in the world.
9. Code Avengers
Based out of New Zealand, Code Avengers provides fun and interactive programming courses that will teach
you how to code games, apps and web sites using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Each
course takes just 12 hours to complete and is available in English, Russian,
Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Turkish and Portuguese.
10. Khan Academy
Created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan, Khan Academy is one of the original free online-learning institutions. With
step-by-step video tutorials, you can learn how to program drawings, animations and
games using JavaScript and ProcessingJS, or learn how to create webpages
with HTML and CSS.
11. Free Food
Camp
Here you’ll learn HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript,
Databases, DevTools, Node.js, Angular.js and Agile by networking and
joining a community of professionals and students. You’ll even work together on
your coding skills so that you can build apps for free. Here’s the catch:
you’re learning those skills and building helps to help solve real-world
problems. Code is available to nonprofits.
12. HTML5 Rocks
This Google project 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 is more advanced than most introductory courses, you may want to
gain some knowledge and experience before jumping in.
Learning code used to require access to expensive books and classes, but
no longer. I highly recommend that every entrepreneur learns to code. Still
wondering if you need to code? Here is a programmer guide I put together to show you every step I took
to become an entrepreneur that codes!