Let us play a game. It is called 'My favourite learning resources'. Here is how it is played: We share learning resources we love as developers or has helped us learn a particular language or framework or technology. We are not doing this just for fun. We are doing this to help us find useful resources that can help us in our career as developers. At this point, I will share a personal experience.
Last year, when I was learning how to React (lol, I was learning React), I didn't know how useful and understandable their official documentation was. It was a developer advocate I met in a Facebook event that encouraged me to check it and it really went a long way in helping to learn React. Tada, the end. Lesson? Share your resources with people because it might go a long way toward helping them. Back to our game.
I know you are excited to share yours but I will go first. In no particular order, here are some of my favourite learning resources:
Disclaimer: This is in no way pitching one resource over another. Different resources work for different people. This is just to help people know available resources that have helped others and they can learn from.
This is where I started learning how to code. This is where I still go to learn new tools or technologies. It is one of the best learning resources for coding and the best part is that it is totally free. Recently, their curriculum was updated to include 6 certifications which include Responsive web design, data visualization, and API and microservices certification.
Why I love FreeCodeCamp is that I get to practice what I learn immediately and there are lots of projects you can work on to apply the knowledge you have gotten.
Udacity is well known for its Nanodegrees but do you know that there are lots of free courses you can take on Udacity as a developer. For example, this link provides a list of courses you can take to ace your skills as a web developer.
Udacity is also great because of its excellent teachers and practical examples. Also, there are practice projects you can do while you are learning.
Codecademy is another popular online resource you can take free coding lessons on. I think it's great for getting started as a beginner. When I was taking lessons in React, before I was introduced to reactjs.org, I found Codecademy very useful because I was able to practice what I learn immediately.
This is a catalogue of the courses they offer.
Mozilla Developers Network(MDN)
The MDN web docs is an excellent resource for web developers. It gives an in-depth explanation of almost all concepts in JavaScript(including ES6) CSS and HTML. It a well-trusted source of knowledge. It also has a collection of articles curated to help beginners get into web development. MDN is super helpful if you want to fully understand any topic and their browser compatibility.
Official Documentation
Shout out to all who write good documentation for their framework, library or tool. What's better than learning from the creators themselves. Previously, I used to think that official docs are not as helpful as tutorials written by others but that has changed. Many docs explain the concepts much more than any other tutorial will. Some even go as far as adding practical examples that you can follow along with. Some examples of good docs I have come across are Reactjs.org, Vuejs.org, Nextjs.org. There are a lot out there and you can learn a lot from them. When learning a new concept, be sure to check out the official docs for it, it might be all you need.
I can go on and on discussing great learning resources I know(like dev.to, I guess you already know this) but I want to hear from you. So what are your favourite learning resources?
Latest comments (50)
This is such a cool idea, thanks for the tips everyone!.
If anyone is looking for a good place to refresh your Sorting Algorithms and Data Structures (Especially Linked Lists) and also pointers.
I highly recommend mycodeschool (youtube.com/channel/UClEEsT7DkdVO_...).
I was struggling with Linked Lists as a concept when i stumbled upon this series. It helped me gain confidence to write my own implementations later on.
Cheers! and keep putting great stuff.
repl.it
w3schools.com
codewars.com
devdocs.io
In no particular order:
Udemy
YouTube (Ben Awad, Derek Banas, Tim Corey, Hamza Mirzer, Traversy, LayoutLand)
Stack Overflow (For more opinionated question/answer topics)
w3schools.org
MDN
Books
GitHub Documentation
Jen Simmons on LayoutLand is an incredible resource for CSS tutorials, especially the new Grid level 1 system, still learning it:
youtube.com/watch?v=FEnRpy9Xfes&t=...
I initially learned React from Hamza Mirza on YouTube. Great channel. This is a link for one of the best react tutorials out there, in the opinion of someone who knew nothing of react (besides its utility as a SPA library) before watching this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=204C9yNeOYI
No one mentioned FrontendMasters, so I will. If I need to dive into some topic or area I prefer to have a thorough course with videos and a lot of materials to work with. This way I can build a solid structure in my head and fill it later with docs, SO, and random googling.
They have great JS courses with different levels of complexity and courses about frameworks, CSS, testing, and other things.
😗 YouTube | YouTube | Youtube 😗
My fav is the free language learning books , all shared on GitHub
Here is example for python free books.
Github Free Books
We use W3Schools a lot at college.
YouTube :)
I'm biased, but I think these are all useful regardless of the language you want to ultimately use:
Excellent list of resources for sure! I remember Codecademy when it was 6 months old and had barely any content. I followed your link and was pleasantly surprised to see how far they've come!
Also +1 on giving love to official docs. If I have a choice, I would much rather comb the docs to find an answer than use SE or SO, but only because I will 100% forget an answer somebody has given me, but will 100% remember how to solve a problem I figured out for myself. As for me, my list is as follows:
Flask Web Development: The Flask Mega Tutorial is, hands down, the best and most comprehensive Python Web development tutorial out there. I've been writing Python code for 5+ years and developing with Flask for close to 4, and i STILL refer to this tutorial almost every time I build something with Flask! Sure, the author, Miguel Grinberg's photo on that tutorial makes one a bit nervous, simply because it makes him look like the cyber criminal villain of a Mission Impossible movie that is holding the world's networks hostage. Over the years he's iterated the tutorial to keep up with Flask and Python. Plus he responds to comments and emails so, if he really has masterminded a Fire Sale, at least he's nice about it :P
Treehouse: All Things Web+
My wife and I freelance together as a designer and developer tag team and Treehouse has been a huge part of us keeping current. It is a pay-for service, but its only about $25/month and that gives you unlimited access to tons and tons of courses on ML, Python Web Development, JS Web Development, SEO, Responsive Web Design, Digital Literacy, Database Design, Swift for iOS, Angular2+, and the list goes on. All the teachers of the on-demand courses that we have taken were members of the community they were teaching; either as core developers to the framework/language, or somebody who worked in the wild with that technology in its current form, every day. While keeping up can be hard with rapid changes, I have grown to really prefer Treehouse over reading countless blog posts that, unfortunately, can conflict on the details of functions or conventions just enough to be quite confusing. Treehouse hasn't done that to us so far. Therefore, we love it.
Coursera: Real College Courses for free!?!
Real college professors, from schools you have ACTUALLY heard of, teaching all sorts of stuff, from CS to art, to music, to history, and its free. Yeah. Pretty much.
In no order what so ever.
I have tried a lot of resources and I think that udemy, books and freecodecamp has the best quality/price relation. Also find codepen.io a very useful tool when researching for specific frontend features and as a sandbox for developing. It allows you to try and error faster that any other tool that I am aware of.
I don't know why I've never knew that freeCodeCamp has such thorough curriculums. That's so great!
Lots of people have mentioned MDN, its good.
Hackerrank is one I used when I was teaching myself Python. Its great because it teaches you by giving you a conceptual snippet and then a problem to solve with an integrated code editor. The downside is the problems are written and created by the community so sometimes the quality is bad. Oh and they have regular competitions and offer services to connect you with companies looking to hire coders.
Coursera is a good resource to learn the basics of computer science theory.....
I'd like to recommend this course:
coursera.org/learn/programming-lan...
It's f****** awesome!!
I think nobody mentioned this course:
CS50
It's great for fundamental knowledge.