Never written a line of code? Start here.
I keep a directory of free ways to learn at brianpfeil.com/learn, sorted by goal, and every link opens without signing in. This is one of its paths: 11 resources, with the ones I'd start with marked ⭐.
- CS50x, by Harvard ⭐: Harvard's intro to computer science, the most popular course of its kind. Scratch, C, Python, SQL and the web.
- freeCodeCamp: Thousands of hours of interactive lessons and projects, with free certifications.
- The Odin Project: A full-stack web curriculum where you build real projects on your own machine.
- Computing, by Khan Academy: Gentle, interactive programming and computer science lessons.
- Learn web development, by MDN: HTML, CSS and JavaScript taught by the people who write the web's reference docs.
- The Missing Semester, by MIT ⭐: The shell, git, editors and debugging — the tools school never teaches.
Made here
- Web Authentication: A mental model of modern web auth — sessions vs tokens, OAuth2/OIDC, passwordless and passkeys — built concept-first but always landing on how you'd wire it into a real app.
- V8 JavaScript Engine: How V8 turns JavaScript into fast machine code — parsing, the JIT pipeline, and hidden classes.
- C++ Standard Library: A practical, category-by-category tour of the most-used C++ standard library classes — containers, strings, smart pointers, algorithms, and more — so you reach for the right one by reflex.
- Browser-Testing Playground: Claude Code as an autonomous E2E/UI tester — driving a browser and verifying behavior.
- Stripe: Hand-build payment integrations that sell digital products — checkout, webhooks, subscriptions.
The up-to-date list, and the other paths (code, cloud, AI, kids and more), is at brianpfeil.com/learn/code/.
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