Learning to code is something every person touched by the Internet and digital technology should try at least once. If you are a wannabe geek, this is one of the satisfying things you can ever do and if you are looking to build an awesome product, being a technical founder can make things easier for you.
But if you are starting out as a noob, here’s the list of ways to launch your learning program. All the tutorials are listed with “no programming experience” in mind.
Tryruby.org
TryRuby gives the learner a Ruby terminal to enter commands into. It suggests each command to type in, and explains what each one does. Most of complaints from the user is that “TryRuby app seems to fail frequently”, but the “next” command will always take you to the next lesson.
Railsforzombies.org
*Note: Before you start out with this tutorial, i would suggest you to finish the above tutorial.
Rails for Zombies integrate screen-casts with interactive elements (run sample code right in the browser) and gamification to create a very unique learning experience. In the first several months over 5,000 people have completed the “Rails for Zombies” course.
Coderace.me
A game that teaches people how to code by matching them up against other people. Users can play up to four opponents, and can toggle the “Help” button whenever an exercise gets too hard for them. The objective is to be fast. You’ll get beaten a few times as a starter, but you’ll learn the code.
Trybloc.com (Invite Only)
It allows anyone to build and deploy web applications in their browser with zero setup, showing results instantly. Bloc also starts you off on full blown projects, like learning how to build a URL shortener. Staying language specific should make the product useful for anyone with particular goals, and Bloc has plans to add additional courses revolving around other topics such as Javascript and APIs.
Udacity.com
Udacity, started by two former Stanford faculty, is offering a limited set of computer science-focused material. Udacity combines the personal, approachable first person teaching style, but then backs it up with interactive programming, all right in the browser.
Learncss
Even if your goal is not to become a designer, learning HTML and CSS can be an amazing skill to have in your resume and will come handy in the future. If this has been on your to-do list for some time, give this tutorial a try for 30 days, it will worth it.
Jqueryair.com
jqueryair teaches jQuery using 5 videos with 56 in browser code challenges mixed between them. This course does cover some basic concepts; the course is also very useful if you want to strengthen your basic jQuery skills.
School of Webcraft
Students can learn through a combination of free and open learning materials, online study groups and hands-on assignments that test their hacking skills.
If you’re a leader in the developer community, you can also step up and lead a course yourself. You’ll get support from P2PU and Mozilla in the form of course design, materials, learning facilitation and other resources.
Codeacademy
Finally, the one you i have liked the most. Codecademy teaches people how to code. Starting with the assumption that you know absolutely nothing at all about coding. It eases you in by asking you to type in your name. And, suddenly, you’re coding. Its gets a little harder from there. But there’s a lot of help for you to finish each levels. The best part is, before you know it you would have spent two hours in the site and know a good amount of javascript.
Other Resources
Here’s good list of resources for more learning, which i guess most people won’t go through because of their lack of interactivity compared to the above list. Nevertheless these are great resources to have in your repertoire
http://www.khanacademy.org/#computer-science
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/1-introduction-to-the-web-standards-cur/#toc
http://reference.sitepoint.com/css
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs
http://htmldog.com/
http://code.google.com/edu/courses.html
http://code.google.com/edu/introductory_courses.html
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
http://thenewboston.org/
http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/HomePage.php
http://cs50.tv/2010/fall/
http://academicearth.org/courses/building-dynamic-websites