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At Curricular, my team and I spend hundreds of hours every month reviewing courses and programs from around the web to recommend the very best. Our goal is to help developers cut through the marketing hype, make quick and confident buying decisions, and get the most from their time and money.
You can check out all our learning guides at curricular.dev.
Whether you're just starting out with CSS, looking to solidify your foundations, or leveling up as a professional front end developer, these are the best self-paced CSS courses and programs for every budget (even free) and learning style.
We independently test and review every course that we recommend. If you purchase a course we recommend, we may earn a commission. Our team includes developers and learning experts who have worked at most of the major learning platforms, but we don't have active employment relationships with any.
Learning CSS Foundations
Scrimba's Learn HTML and CSS and Learn Responsive Design - Our Top Pick to Learn CSS Foundations
$39 per month | 25-30 hours to complete
These are two of the most impressive beginner-friendly HTML and CSS courses available. Well made, effective, engaging, and a lot of fun.
Why It's Great
- Beginner-friendly
- Aimed at aspiring professionals
- Emphasis on learning by doing
- Option to start with a free course
Scrimba's approach involves learning the concepts by building functional websites. Each tutorial builds one upon another, and applies increasingly advanced concepts as you progress.
The Learn HTML and CSS course curriculum is available for free, while the Learn Responsive Design course requires subscription. A Pro subscription also gets you a completion certificate, full access to the community, and peer code reviews on your projects.
Get these courses at scrimba.com/allcourses
Frontend Masters' CSS Path - Runner Up For Learning CSS Foundations
$39 per month | 20-25 hours to complete
Solid on-ramp to CSS, going from the basics to professional-level CSS, with a particularly strong emphasis on real-world frontend development.
Why It's Great
- Expert teachers
- Real world insights
- Workshop format makes you feel like you're there
Frontend Masters has some incredible instructors in their CSS path, coming from the front lines of some of the world’s top startups and tech giants.
The courses are broken up into focused deep dives on particular topics, so you'll get a thorough understanding of techniques like animations, variables, responsive design, and more.
We really liked that each of the courses is chock-full of practical application and real-world scenarios. You'll learn incredibly valuable real-world CSS tips and avoid rookie mistakes.
And the recent addition of the CSS Projects course has brought some much-needed hands-on practice to the platform. The workshop gives you project prompts and then walks through the instructor's solution.
Get this learning path at frontendmasters.com
Codecademy's Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and GitHub Pages - Another Great Option for Learning CSS Foundations
$25 per month | 25-30 hours to complete
Solid hands-on option for learning how to design, build, and deploy simple websites.
Why It's Great
- Beginner-friendly
- In-browser Coding Exercises
- Hands-on Learning
- Frequent Practice
The course material is almost entirely comprised of short readings and coding exercises to teach you each concept. This keeps your hands on the keyboard from the first lesson.
Each section of the course includes a hands-on project, most of which include detailed step by step instructions. The scenarios for these projects aren't always the most relevant to professional web development, but are typically engaging and illustrate the core concepts well.
The path wraps up with a capstone project where you have to apply all the skills you've learned to design and build a landing page for a school, given a set of wireframes. This fairly meaty project will definitely put your skills to the test.
Before You Buy
This path combines the Learn CSS course and Intermediate CSS courses, which are available for free. But if you subscribe and take this path, you also get access to some guided projects, practices, and the capstone project.
Most of the hands-on projects are guided, with step by step instructions. This means they're not terribly challenging, so you may reach the capstone project and find it takes a while to adjust to writing CSS without guidance.
Get this course at codecademy.com
FreeCodeCamp's Responsive Web Design Path - A Great Free Option to Learn CSS Foundations
Free | 25-30 hours to complete
If you’re brand new to programming, this is a great starting point for learning the basics, especially since it's free. After getting up to speed with the basics, you should consider moving to another more robust solution grounded in real world application.
Why It's Great
- Hands-on learning
- Beginners
- Getting started quickly
This learning path starts with the basics and covers the essentials of designing and coding websites through a series of guided projects. After completing this path, you’ll understand various aspects of web page styling, including modern techniques like variables and pseudo-classes. You'll get lots of practice making web designs responsive and accessible.
Before You Buy
Many of the challenges are actually quite simple to game or guess at, because the reading gives away too many clues. We would prefer to see more difficult challenges built into the curriculum in order to help students build skills along the way. You may want to take on some additional challenges at Frontend Mentor, CodePen, or 100 Days of CSS to practice the concepts as you’re learning them.
Some of the projects aren't quite real world. So if you're looking to launch a career as a frontend web developer, make sure you continue with some independent projects that follow a real-world scenario.
Find this learning path at freecodecamp.org
Learning Intermediate CSS
Frontend Masters' CSS Path Electives - Top Pick for Learning Intermediate CSS
$39 per month | 25-30 hours to complete
A solid series of expert-led workshops that take you from the foundations of professional-level CSS to equip you will the skills to become a frontend leader.
Why It's Great
- Code-along workshops
- Expert teachers
- Real world insights
With this path, you'll dig into more advanced topics in CSS, like creating SVGs and building design systems.
Get this learning path at frontendmasters.com
Scrimba's Learn UI Design - Runner Up to Learn Intermediate CSS
$39 per month | 10-15 hours to complete
Excellent deep dive into professional-level CSS topics. Solid combination of topic coverage, learning experience, instructor quality, and delivery of learning outcomes for aspiring frontend developers.
Why It's Great
- Expert instructor
- Emphasis on learning by doing
- Projects with peer code reviews
- Learn both techniques and design best practices
If you like learning by building projects and want lots of hands-on practice, you’ll love this course. Scrimba’s methodical approach to teaching concepts means you’re practicing something hands-on right after learning it, and then putting everything together into a project.
In this course, you'll build three real-world projects, including
Get this course at scrimba.com
Learning Advanced CSS
Josh Comeau's CSS for JS Developers - Top Pick for Advanced CSS
$399 (PPP available) | 40 hours to complete
A gold-standard learning experience that covers essential concepts along with advanced CSS topics, and goes deep into how CSS works through written and interactive tutorials.
Why It's Great
- Multi-format tutorials keep the course engaging
- Excellent explanations
- Supplemental resources covering numerous topics
- Aimed at professionals
This course is specifically tailored to professional JavaScript developers (familiarity with React, Angular is a must) to help solidify key concepts in CSS and take your knowledge to the next level.
Throughout the course, Josh uses a variety of formats, from in-depth written tutorials with interactive examples, to exercises and interactive quizzes, and guided projects.
It's an incredibly polished, highly intentional curriculum. While it's certainly a high-end learning option, if you're serious about getting great at CSS, and are already proficient with JavaScript, this course will take your skills to the next level.
Top comments (2)
CSSBattle has a nice game-like interactive course - cssbattle.dev/learn
simply amazing!
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