(From PC Magazine, By Molly K. McLaughlin)
“Codecademy has a bold mission—to rethink education from the bottom up—and it’s working on that on the web and out in the world through a handful of nonprofit initiatives. On the web, Codecademy offers courses to make learning to code and designing websites fun and easy. You can choose to learn specific languages, such as JavaScript, or even learn the (IBM) Watson API. Even better, all the classes are free, though a new paid plan offers additional learning tools and live support. This makes Codecademy our Editors’ Choice for free online coding classes.
Note: Codecademy is focused on teaching beginners. There are some advanced courses covering Ruby, PHP, and AngularJS, but you won’t find C or Java classes here. In the coming months, Codecademy will be rolling out new courses and refreshing its interface. Some older courses will be discontinued; if you’re in the middle of one, your progress will be lost, but your achievements will be saved, so you’ll still be able to track which courses (new and old) you’ve completed.
Class Selection, Features, and Help
When you select a course, Codecademy offers an overview, including the topics you’ll need to be familiar with and prerequisite courses. Codecademy also walks you through course prep, including installing anything you need to complete the course.
After the intro, you’re brought to a new environment to start building. From here, you slowly build on your skills and start completing challenges in order to move forward with the lesson. Your progress is always saved, so you can stop at any time without worrying about losing your work.
If you opt for specific programming language classes, you’ll get more detail on how each language works and do more basic tasks before moving on to bigger projects. The environment is the same, and you’ll also complete challenges along the way. These classes are on par with Treehouse’s$25.00 at Treehouse offerings, though neither goes into quite as much detail as Code Avengers does.”
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