Best coding resources for beginners?

Wooten

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What up people.

I've recently started learning to code and surely enough, it's overwhelming in the beginning. Now, I'm particularly interested in learning HTML, CSS ( basics ) and then javascript and php. I'm using codecademy courses as my main resource as well as documentations, but I'm starting to notice that it falls a bit short regarding things it actually teaches.

So I would like to ask experienced developers or people who are learning or have learned, what resources/courses could you suggest for a beginner to learn from. Can be paid or free, don't matter. Quality is important :)

Thank you!
 
I am not a programmer but always love to read similar topics. This is really not a good place to ask such a question since majority of this community are doing IM not know programming so u can guess.

I would assume u want to be a "full stack" web developer because of what you are learning now, so if I were u, I would choose some good books to start, google sth, like best PHP books, best HTML5/CSS3 books in 2019, top javascript books, etc.

Hook up with a good and responsive community is a must. Dev.to, stackoverflow, stackexchange, reddit groups, or even slack, you can literally find the right answers when you have any possible problems.

Books maybe not fit for everyone for sure, nowadays people love to learn things via videos, teaching courses, so Youtube channel is your best friend in this case, https://www.youtube.com/user/TechGuyWeb , this channel is very popular and teaching full stack development, I am sure u can find a lot of good info there.

Or choose some popular online courses like your codecademy, Udemy, Lynda etc, or any interactive platforms which can give u homework after each section.

You can find more info in the videos from those popular channels, good luck to your learning!
 
Codecademy does fall rather short of actually teaching you any real world skills. I've heard good things about freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/

They have HTML5 and CSS3 courses to get you started at least. A word of warning though, JavaScript can be a real bitch, so trying to learn JS after, well, markdown and styling can be intimidating.

If I were able to choose now I'd learn Python before PHP or JS. Understanding Python is far easier, but then again, if you're planning to build on WordPress, PHP and JS are much more useful.
 
I am not a programmer but always love to read similar topics. This is really not a good place to ask such a question since majority of this community are doing IM not know programming so u can guess.

I would assume u want to be a "full stack" web developer because of what you are learning now, so if I were u, I would choose some good books to start, google sth, like best PHP books, best HTML5/CSS3 books in 2019, top javascript books, etc.

Hook up with a good and responsive community is a must. Dev.to, stackoverflow, stackexchange, reddit groups, or even slack, you can literally find the right answers when you have any possible problems.

Books maybe not fit for everyone for sure, nowadays people love to learn things via videos, teaching courses, so Youtube channel is your best friend in this case, https://www.youtube.com/user/TechGuyWeb , this channel is very popular and teaching full stack development, I am sure u can find a lot of good info there.

Or choose some popular online courses like your codecademy, Udemy, Lynda etc, or any interactive platforms which can give u homework after each section.

You can find more info in the videos from those popular channels, good luck to your learning!

Thank you, that's great advice. I'm more into reading things rather than watching videos, which is why I started with codecademy.

And yes, I'm looking kinda into full stack, but I have a specific goal to work for a particular company, and these are the languages that are necessary for what they work with. So the goal currently is to learn as much as possible on my own and then jump aboard a local boot camp to solidify and expand the knowledge as well as build some connections with other developers. But I also want to develop a skill set to be able to freelance.

I know people here are more focused on IM, but I've seen a lot of comments around to know there are enough coders in the community to respond :)

In any case, I super appreciate your answer!

Codecademy does fall rather short of actually teaching you any real world skills. I've heard good things about freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/

They have HTML5 and CSS3 courses to get you started at least. A word of warning though, JavaScript can be a real bitch, so trying to learn JS after, well, markdown and styling can be intimidating.

If I were able to choose now I'd learn Python before PHP or JS. Understanding Python is far easier, but then again, if you're planning to build on WordPress, PHP and JS are much more useful.

Yes, after a week of full time going through HTML and CSS on codecademy that's my conclusion as well. It's great to get basics of syntax, but the gamified approach doesn't force you to think, because everything is pretty much suggested during exercises, so there's no need to "find out" the answer.
But I do still like how everything is laid out in a path sort of way, which is great to follow, as long as you are doing your own things in your own editor.

As for FCC, I've tried it and I use it, but at least when it comes to html and css, it has even less information than codecademy. And in their practice exercises they sort of endorse writing css code within the html using <style> tags, instead of creating separate pages for each and it's just weird to me.
But I'll continue to use them nonetheless.

Thanks!
 
The only really productive way to learn coding in my opinion is to build things. It's less overwhelming, and you absorb 10x more knowledge than reading about it, so your goal should be to start a basic project as soon as you can and then keep on trying to build more and more. You'll be surprised how quick you learn by doing this.

If you're interested in web development then you need to learn a combination of markdown (html, css, ie. things that just change what a page looks like) and programmatic coding (php and javascript are significantly more complicated than markdown because they can do much more).

As LostConnection mentioned, JS is a bit of a bugger to get your head around in the beginning compared to something like Python or PHP, but JS is also probably equal 1st place for the most useful language you could learn (equal first with Python).

I would suggest either diving into html and css on their own to get some practical coding happening in a relatively simple way (you'll learn html/css very fast because it's easy to get your head around), or start learning Python before other programmatic languages.

If you start with JS you might do fine, but there's a good chance it will be too many new concepts at once and you'll get the impression that all coding is as tough as JS. It's not - html, css and Python are all very learner friendly and once you can code even half-decently in them, you'll be able to tackle PHP and JS much more easily because there is a lot of crossover which you'll already understand.


For web dev, I've always found treehouse to be quite good, but like I said you'll pick it up quickly if you're practically applying it, so loads of videos and courses for html/css aren't really necessary imo.

If you want a course to start with: https://teamtreehouse.com/library/i...iar-with-html-and-css/welcome-to-html-and-css

This video is also 7 years old, but it's great if you want to get a rounded understanding of how to build websites with wordpress:
You can use this video to build a basic site, and then learn the basics of html/css from treehouse course and apply them to the wordpress site you're building. You have to dip your toes into a real project to learn properly and quickly.


This is the best course to learn the basics of Python quickly -> Dr Chuck is a good teacher: https://www.coursera.org/learn/python (this was the actually first python course I worked through)

This is a simple small project (building a basic webscraper with Python) which is perfect for cementing knowledge and seeing practical results. Follow on from the course above by working through building this webscraper and by the end of that you'll understand the basics of Python quite well: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/build-a-basic-web-scraper-in-python/

Once you understand things like loops, conditional statements and different data types, go to projecteuler.net and try to work your way through those problems. You'll learn 100x faster doing this than just reading about it or watching people talk about it.

Use stackoverflow constantly to ask other coders for help when you're learning and be prepared to research things on Big G non-stop when you're starting out.

Once you've got a grip on html, css and python basics, start looking into php or js.
 
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Have you ever tried the coding challenge type sites? CoderByte and HackerRank are two off the top of my head. It's a good way to get your hands dirty and apply what you know.
 
Have you ever tried the coding challenge type sites? CoderByte and HackerRank are two off the top of my head. It's a good way to get your hands dirty and apply what you know.

Well, I don't have much skill to take on these challenges, but that definitely looks like a good way to practice with a little more knowledge. Didn't know about these, so I've bookmarked them for the future. Thanks !


I'll have a look into these. Cheers!
 
I almost forgot, CS50 is a pretty famous free computer science course offered by Harvard. That class itself is more geared towards actual science, but they started a side class, "Web Programming With Python and Javascript". I didn't take this one, but the instructor is top notch and pretty famous in his own right. This class actually has graded homework too. https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-web-programming-with-python-and-javascript
 
Try .NET Core, there is upcoming .NET 5 in the feature. You can use Rider for Linux development or Visual Studio.

Easy to start fullstack.
Project templates, tooling, language...
Not many different frameworks like PHP enviornment.

You can try Udemy courses, there might be some helpful resources, then starting creating your own things from simple components like static webpage, form and add database, logic and similiar stuff you need.
 
Honestly I’m having a lot of success with YouTube, CodePen, GitHub & Wappalayzer (to see what a website was built on). A lot of trial & error with the examples but really useful. Once you get the hang of it, you could do small projects, use APIs and all that jazz.
 
Personally with nearly 30 years in IT I would do one thing first.
Prioritize your goals.

If your goal is to create and design websites for a career, then go ahead and learn everything you can.
If your goal is to create and design 3 - 5 websites a year for a PBN then hire someone to create them.

The way I look at IT now after years of making mistakes is that : learning hard core skills for short term goals is a waste of your time and effort.
I did an MCSE back in 2004, worked and studied my balls off to get it and it has paid back dividends throughout my career, along with my CCNA. Because those two skills have been the focus of my contracting career.
I learned Java Script to make a twitter bot, tore my hair out - screamed at the screen, got frustrated and wasted a lot of time., because I could have bought a bot off the shelf for a few quid online that was far superior to the hack job I had done.

So now I look at a project and ask myself, which skills am I going to use the most.. if any ?
Can I buy what I need for less than my own hourly rate?
Whats the core of the project?
Do the skills I have now match or are similar to the skills I want to achieve ? <- this is a big one, I was taught by a very good Physiologist to look at the skill I thought was my strongest. She said that most people didn't realize that the skills we are best at, are because our brains are wired towards doing them. Its one of the reasons why a lot fewer girls are in IT than men. Its not because any less intelligent than men but because their brains aren't wired the same way, it just a fact of evolution.
In other words, you will naturally gravitate towards the skills your brain is wired to do the easiest.
That's why geeks are geeks and you know in a matter of minutes talking to them , they are geeks.
My friends daughter started a hairdressing apprenticeship when she was 16, she went all the way through and qualified, but as her mother admitted to me, she wasn't that good lol. Now 5 years later shes a well paid statistical analysis for a large data storage company in my City. When I was working for the company she was unemployed and I found her a junior office assistant job at the firm. Her brain was wired for math, I don't think her hairdressing career was a waste of time , it taught her interpersonal skills that will help her in the future, but , again as her mother said "no one in their right mind with let her near them with a pair of scissors", lol
What I'm trying to say is, if your learning something and suddenly you realize the suns coming up, and you haven't smashed the keyboard or screamed at the dog, then maybe its your thing. If not, buy what you need and try something else.
Good luck anyway what ever you decide to do.
 
Honestly I’m having a lot of success with YouTube, CodePen, GitHub & Wappalayzer (to see what a website was built on). A lot of trial & error with the examples but really useful. Once you get the hang of it, you could do small projects, use APIs and all that jazz.

any particular youtube channel you'd recommend?

Meant if you'd like them in member downloads...or PM me if you have a different course/ebook in mind as I might have it.

I'm terribly sorry, I definitely misunderstood you there.

if you perhaps have this https://www.packtpub.com/web-develo...sterclass-using-html-css-and-javascript-video , it would be of great help. I couldn't find it on members downloads.

Also, anything beginner friendly on javascript is also appreciated !

Thanks!

Personally with nearly 30 years in IT I would do one thing first.
Prioritize your goals.

If your goal is to create and design websites for a career, then go ahead and learn everything you can.
If your goal is to create and design 3 - 5 websites a year for a PBN then hire someone to create them.

The way I look at IT now after years of making mistakes is that : learning hard core skills for short term goals is a waste of your time and effort.
I did an MCSE back in 2004, worked and studied my balls off to get it and it has paid back dividends throughout my career, along with my CCNA. Because those two skills have been the focus of my contracting career.
I learned Java Script to make a twitter bot, tore my hair out - screamed at the screen, got frustrated and wasted a lot of time., because I could have bought a bot off the shelf for a few quid online that was far superior to the hack job I had done.

So now I look at a project and ask myself, which skills am I going to use the most.. if any ?
Can I buy what I need for less than my own hourly rate?
Whats the core of the project?
Do the skills I have now match or are similar to the skills I want to achieve ? <- this is a big one, I was taught by a very good Physiologist to look at the skill I thought was my strongest. She said that most people didn't realize that the skills we are best at, are because our brains are wired towards doing them. Its one of the reasons why a lot fewer girls are in IT than men. Its not because any less intelligent than men but because their brains aren't wired the same way, it just a fact of evolution.
In other words, you will naturally gravitate towards the skills your brain is wired to do the easiest.
That's why geeks are geeks and you know in a matter of minutes talking to them , they are geeks.
My friends daughter started a hairdressing apprenticeship when she was 16, she went all the way through and qualified, but as her mother admitted to me, she wasn't that good lol. Now 5 years later shes a well paid statistical analysis for a large data storage company in my City. When I was working for the company she was unemployed and I found her a junior office assistant job at the firm. Her brain was wired for math, I don't think her hairdressing career was a waste of time , it taught her interpersonal skills that will help her in the future, but , again as her mother said "no one in their right mind with let her near them with a pair of scissors", lol
What I'm trying to say is, if your learning something and suddenly you realize the suns coming up, and you haven't smashed the keyboard or screamed at the dog, then maybe its your thing. If not, buy what you need and try something else.
Good luck anyway what ever you decide to do.

I can totally agree with you on everything you've said. The idea of me learning to code is basically I'm trying to do a career shift. There's is a particular company I would like to work for as well as be able to do freelance work. So learning everything I can might make sense.

Now, I'm not sure if coding is for me or not. I think it's way too soon to tell, considering that I've been learning only for like 30 hours or so. But I currently have time to invest and without actually putting in the effort, I won't know whether it's for me or not. It is unfortunate, that I'm not really sure how my brain is wired and what I would actually be very good at.

In any case, I appreciate your input!
 
This is where I started and still use for simple direction.

https://www.w3schools.com


I then use the manual for each subject.

I did the following in exams but used their website.

HTML
html5
bootstrap
PHP
MySQL
ajax
javascript
css (( 1,2,3))

adobe illustrator .
dreamweaver .

i went to collauge and done , intruduction, intermediate, advance on all above subjects .

if you're going to use it for bots I suggest python
 
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any particular youtube channel you'd recommend?



I'm terribly sorry, I definitely misunderstood you there.

if you perhaps have this https://www.packtpub.com/web-develo...sterclass-using-html-css-and-javascript-video , it would be of great help. I couldn't find it on members downloads.

Also, anything beginner friendly on javascript is also appreciated !

Thanks!



I can totally agree with you on everything you've said. The idea of me learning to code is basically I'm trying to do a career shift. There's is a particular company I would like to work for as well as be able to do freelance work. So learning everything I can might make sense.

Now, I'm not sure if coding is for me or not. I think it's way too soon to tell, considering that I've been learning only for like 30 hours or so. But I currently have time to invest and without actually putting in the effort, I won't know whether it's for me or not. It is unfortunate, that I'm not really sure how my brain is wired and what I would actually be very good at.

In any case, I appreciate your input!

You do know what your good at, your posting a thread in a forum on the internet. Something less than 0.5% of the worlds population has ever done. Your English is excellent, your sentence structure is to, and by the way you write I can tell you have good interpersonal skills and no doubt a polite person in real life.

Those skills alone make you stand way above the average man in the street.

I urge everyone to take Jordan Peterson's Personality test before they embark on any career choice. $10's that will save you 10's of thousands in the future.
 
I'll add my few cents here. I've been coding for a few years--I started by taking online programming classes at Udemy--the classes for beginners can be very robust with videos, notes and lectures and they cost something like $10 / class. The best courses, teachers will respond to students and answer their questions. I'm not that great--pretty good at hacking together working programs, less so at building really-robust products used by thousands of people.

The programming I do is more for analytics / building products and less about doing web / HTML / CSS. But the best way for me to learn personally is from building products / programming than just taking classes. You can learn the basic syntax, but it won't sink in until you're really building stuff.

What programming really helped me get good at was product management. Because I've built products myself, I have a really good idea on how things should be built, even if I didn't build them myself. You can get really good products built by finding remote developers using Freelancer.com or other services. I've had some kick-ass things built for like $200, and the time it would have taken me to learn to build what they built would have cost at least 10x, if not 100x. And if a guy in India can program for you at like $5 / hour, does it make sense for you to learn to be as good as he is?

I would learn to code well enough so that you tell other people how to do it and can correct their mistakes when they don't do things exactly as well as you'd like.
 
You do know what your good at, your posting a thread in a forum on the internet. Something less than 0.5% of the worlds population has ever done. Your English is excellent, your sentence structure is to, and by the way you write I can tell you have good interpersonal skills and no doubt a polite person in real life.

Those skills alone make you stand way above the average man in the street.

I urge everyone to take Jordan Peterson's Personality test before they embark on any career choice. $10's that will save you 10's of thousands in the future.

You are very kind with your words. However, I don't think these "soft skills" really matter when it comes to actually having a career/making a living. At least not from my own experience.

I'm aware of this particular test, but I've been avoiding it for a little while due to not being in a good mental state, which as far as I know can affect the results. So I'd rather sort myself out before participating in these assessments. But other than that, that's a great suggestion from your part!


Bit large so took a while https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/course-webdev-html-css-and-javascript.1120523/ Upload crashed couple times so PM me if any video is broken. Enjoy!

Thank you! Finished downloading, and will let you know if any of the videos are missing. I super appreciate you taking the time to upload this !

I'll add my few cents here. I've been coding for a few years--I started by taking online programming classes at Udemy--the classes for beginners can be very robust with videos, notes and lectures and they cost something like $10 / class. The best courses, teachers will respond to students and answer their questions. I'm not that great--pretty good at hacking together working programs, less so at building really-robust products used by thousands of people.

The programming I do is more for analytics / building products and less about doing web / HTML / CSS. But the best way for me to learn personally is from building products / programming than just taking classes. You can learn the basic syntax, but it won't sink in until you're really building stuff.

What programming really helped me get good at was product management. Because I've built products myself, I have a really good idea on how things should be built, even if I didn't build them myself. You can get really good products built by finding remote developers using Freelancer.com or other services. I've had some kick-ass things built for like $200, and the time it would have taken me to learn to build what they built would have cost at least 10x, if not 100x. And if a guy in India can program for you at like $5 / hour, does it make sense for you to learn to be as good as he is?

I would learn to code well enough so that you tell other people how to do it and can correct their mistakes when they don't do things exactly as well as you'd like.

Well I'm oriented towards web apps/web development. I've started to learned because I want a career change from the current one and have a particular company in mind that requires the languages I've mentioned in the OP.

What languages have you learned ? Any particular courses on Udemy that are worth the time?

I know the best way to learn anything is to just get your hands dirty and that's what I intend to do, but the basics are still necessary.
 
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