Codecademy.com is the a novel way to learn how to code. It was launched in August 2011 by Zach Sims, Ryan Bubinski. It’s interactive, fun and apparently you can do it with your friends. The site reckons that after following the courses you’ll be able to build great websites, games and apps. The site uses and incorporates the current fashion “badges and gaming”. Basically, it has incorporated by ability to keep tabs on your friends’ progress and make sure you’re learning more and faster. Within 72 hours of launching it had 200,000 users with 2.1 Million Lessons Completed.
What’s been said so far:
TechCrunch says: a slick, fun way to teach yourself how to program. The app has done an excellent job minimizing the frustration often associated with writing your first lines of code, and it sports a good-looking and intuitive interface. Another plus: the initial signup flow doesn’t show up til you’ve completed your first few lessons, so you’re writing code within a few seconds of landing at Codecademy.com.
Venture Beat says: The site is free to use. It’s social — you can learn along with your friends — and incentivized with badges and friendly competition. Learners can also track their progress through the various lessons on the site. Best of all, the site is completely interactive. If you’ve ever had to sit through college lectures, screencasts or coding tutorials, you know what a boon interactivity is to learning web development.
The New York Times says: Codeacademy is an online tool designed to give computer science newbies a crash course in the basics.
Current courses on offer are:
Getting started with Programming
Time to become a coding ninja. Written by Ryan Bubinski with 8 lessons and 42 exercises.
- Getting to Know You, Part 1 – see what you can do with programming.
- Confirm or Deny – Alerting users and more
- Variables – Start saving what you’re working on
- Numbers n Strings – what separates text from numbers and more
- Editor and Arrays – The console’s not the only game in town !
- What If ? – If Statements and more
- Bringing It Up (and Down) – Incrementing and Decrementing
- While you wait – the while loop is just as useful as for!
The Document Object Model & jQuery
Use Javascript to get the elements in a page and do cool stuff with them. Written by Andrew Parker and consists of 2 lessons.
- Manipulating the DOM – Learn about the Document Object Model and use their knowledge to read and change attributes within HTML pages.
- Introducing jQuery – get started with jQuery and its basic DOM manipulation API.
Functions in JavaScript
Learn how to define a function in JavaScript. A function is a piece of code that takes zero or more values as inputs, performs some computation and then returns a result. You will also learn about the concept of variable scope which determines how and where in the code the value of a variable can be accessed. It was written by Albert Wenger and has 3 lessons with 9 exercises.
- Introducing Functions – See how a function is defined and used. Learn to define your first simple function.
- Understanding Arguments – Functions can accept input known as arguments. This section explores arguments.
- Local Variables – storing data, such as intermediate values of a calculation, in variable sinside of a function.
JavaScript Quick Start Guide
A guide to JavaScript for people who already know how to code in other languages. It was written by Sid Nair and has 8 lessons and 45 exercises.
- Hello, World – start playing around with JavaScript.
- Variables and Types – Learn a little about variables and types in JavaScript.
- Booleans – Learn all about truthiness in JavaScript.
- Control Flow – Before getting into functions, they quickly review control flow syntax in JavaScript.
- Basic Functions – Learn the basics of creating functions in JavaScript
- Strings – learn how to use strings in JavaScript
- Numbers – Learn how numbers work in JavaScript
- Intro to Objects – Start learning about objects.
The future for codecademy.com
Codecademy.com are looking at increasing their courses and you can follow them on Twitter to hear about more courses as they come online. If you are interested in writing a lesson for Codecademy.com, you can fill out a form on their website and they’ll send you an invite to their Codecademy Teacher Beta.
Costings
It’s FREE. So, if you need to get started with JavaScript, or just perhaps just increasing your knowledge, perhaps a visit to codecademy.com can help.
