Anna's Top 10 Resources to Learn How to Code

Pluralsight is one of my most favorite online educational platforms! I've worked in various positions, ranging from an IT consultant to working in a startup to a career in a big financial corporation. In each of these jobs, the company recommended developers to use Pluralsight to learn new skills.

Courses on Pluralsight are taught by professionals in the tech industry. Every author must have real-world experience and pass peer review before they start creating a course, so you know you're being taught by someone who knows what they're doing. 

Pluralsight also has skills assessment tests that help them decide what courses to recommend you. Furthermore, they give you access to talks from the latest developers' conferences, providing you with multiple options for high-quality resources.

With over 150,000 online courses, Udemy is another one of my top 3 places to go when I want to learn a new programming skill. They may offer free courses, but all of the best courses are paid. 

However, it’s very important to remember that Udemy is almost always running promotions, so even though they list courses for $150 to $200, you should never buy for that price. You have low-price options to buy courses for as cheap as $12. 

Before you buy any course, research the author and look at reviews because almost anyone can write on Udemy. My favorite authors, personally, are Tim Buchalka, Maximilian Schwarzmüller, Rob Percival, and Jose Portilla.

Coursera takes third place on my top 3 online educational platforms list. On this site, there are plenty of courses that are taught by top universities like Stanford, Princeton, or Yale on different topics ranging from web development to artificial intelligence. They also offer classes for all levels of experience. 

Courses are constantly updated and new ones released frequently, so you can always find something new to learn. I highly recommend the Algorithms course and multiple of their java courses (part of the Java path).

One of my favorite aspects of Coursera is that they give you assignments to challenge yourself. But if you want to get feedback on your assignment or if you want to get certification on course completion, you need to pay. I advise using the audit version of courses. 

If you want to become a professional programmer and don’t want to be embarrassed by the code you write, then Clean Code by Robert C.Martin is a must-read! This book will show you principles, patterns, and best practices for writing clean code. 

In this book, the author goes over case studies where he shows you examples of poor coding and how you can transform them into well written and self-sufficient code. You will also learn how to spot deficiencies right away. 

When you read this book, I recommend writing notes for yourself because you will definitely reuse all of it in your work. Also, though the examples in this book are in Java, you can apply it to other languages as well.

O'Reilly is a publisher for the most highly-rated programming books for many languages. With this subscription to their site, you will get online access to all of their material. They hold online workshops with highly experienced professionals almost every day. 

On this service, you can do live online workshops with chat and ask any questions you want to the instructor. This is really an amazing aspect of the service! Some of the instructors are so well known that they actually teach many corporate developers, so using O'Reilly will definitely help you develop professionally. They also have video courses and discounts for military members and students.

This online platform helps you learn to code by building projects. It is excellent for absolute beginners. There is a great forum where you can connect with like-minded people. Since sometimes learning to code can get really hard, getting inspiration from the community to continue to learn is an important part of this service. 

FreeCodeCamp also allows you to earn certifications, though it requires completing 5 projects and passing their tests. Additionally, they provide you with resources to help with coding interviews. Make sure to check their blog and YouTube channel where they have thousands of hours of video courses to get even more supplemental material.

Edx is a nonprofit, open-source educational platform that was founded by Harvard and MIT. You can find a wide range of computer science courses here, from mobile development to machine learning. All of the material is on-demand. 

The quality of the lectures is top-notch, and they also provide challenging homework assignments. If you want to earn a certificate and take tests then you need to pay around $50-70, but they also have a free version. 

This resource is especially good for those who want to learn Python! You can’t go wrong with classes from such well-respected universities. 

This educational platform is very good for people with no knowledge of coding. This is an interactive platform that takes care of the frustrating part of setting up coding projects—you pretty much jump into learning syntax and language aspects right away. Another big bonus is that they provide cheatsheets for you. 

Even though they have a broad range of languages listed, the majority of their courses are in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or Python. You can take a path or pick a specific course.

If you are an absolute beginner, I would recommend starting with their HTML, CSS, JavaScript courses, or web development path. If you don’t know where to start you can also take their free “programming personality” quiz here.

Skillshare is similar to Udemy, but the course collection is a lot smaller. However, you can still find some useful courses. Courses are also shorter than on Udemy and can fit people who like to take courses that last a couple of weeks. Personally, I mostly like web design and front end development courses on this website.

The best part of Skillshare is that you get to work on projects and can get feedback from their community and teachers. You can also join groups of like-minded people who are also learning the same skills as you. Additionally, they send you emails with class recommendations for you.

This is a book that you will hear a lot of programmers quote! While it's not a technical book and it will not teach you how to code, it will teach you how to think like a programmer and apply certain concepts and patterns to many situations that you'll face throughout your career. 

Many aspects are touched in this book, such as software development principles, best ways to approach debugging, how to build prototypes, how to communicate to your team and take initiatives, and how to communicate to your users. It is also very easy and fun to read. Sometimes when I feel demotivated, I just pick a chapter and read it again.