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Sarah Chima
Sarah Chima

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What Are Your Favourite Learning Resources?

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.

FreeCodeCamp

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

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

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?

Oldest comments (50)

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midblue profile image
Jasper Stephenson

It's not web development, but when I was trying to learn Unity and its flavor of C#, following along with this channel's well-paced, friendly, fun videos made learning a breeze! Highly recommend his "Breakfast with Unity" series that has ~15 minute micro-projects where you can learn one specific skill at a time, and always make something awesome in the end.
PushyPixels on Youtube

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Sarah Chima

Great, thanks for sharing this.

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aswathm78 profile image
Aswath KNM

YouTube YouTube and stack overflow

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Sarah Chima

Nice!!!

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kaelscion

heck yeah for YouTube man. Sentdex is one of my favorites. Quirky delivery, easy to follow code examples, and playing Starcraft 2 against an AI he developed and trained for that purpose as we watched. Great stuff.

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Pavon Dunbar

In no order:

Team Treehouse
Udemy
YouTube Channels
MDN

And I'm open to other resources that will make me a better developer. I will never claim to be an expert because the technological landscape is ever changing; so there is always something to learn.

That's what I love about this amazing and dynamic field.

Pavon

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Sarah Chima

These are great resources Pavon. Thanks for sharing.

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sturzl profile image
Avery

To learn a new language beyond the syntax: exercism.io

Free, Feedback from real people as you go, tons of examples and community support

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sarah_chima profile image
Sarah Chima

I've never heard of Exercism.io before now. Thanks for sharing

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Logan Helms

Safari Books Online and Udemy. Udemy gets you up and going fast. Safari allows you to deep dive.

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Sarah Chima

Awesome

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bjhaid_93 profile image
/[Abejide Femi Jr]\s/

Udemy(i go for the highest rated courses)
MDN
FrontEnd masters
programmingwithmosh.com
Pluralsight

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Sarah Chima

Thanks for sharing this

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Christian Vasquez • Edited

I would say...

  1. Udacity
  2. Udemy
  3. Documentation
  4. DEV posts
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Harish Garg

Been at this from so many years and learned and dabbled in so many different languages and technologies, that now more specific "how-tos" work better for me than from the scatch resources.

Given that, here are some I have found it very useful.

StackOverflow
The best resource is the generosity of random strangers in places like stackoverflow.com, both who have posted the question as well as people who have answered. There is almost nothing you can't find a solution to.

httpsiseasy.com/
This is one of the best examples of how to build a learning resource for a particular practical goal in mind. I went from having a non-https website to an https in 10 mins.

From past experience, years back, when I was trying to learn python, the best resource I found was learnpythonthehardway.org/

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Philip Hallstrom

For quickly getting the gist of a language... learnxinyminutes.com

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Sarah Chima

Great

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Matt Studdert

Great resources Sarah! 🙌

There are so many great resources I decided to list them on my website Frontend Mentor.

I listed all of the ones that have helped me or my students before that are either completely free or have decent free options.

A couple of favourites from the list are:

  • freeCodeCamp
  • Udacity
  • Wes Bos (great teaching style)

I'll be updating the whole site next week, including the resources page. So, while dev.to is currently not one of the resources on the live site (sorry everyone 😬), it will be added next week and would definitely be one of my favourite resources!

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roberthopman profile image
Robert
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Sarah Chima

Nice

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Rupesh Krishna Jha

In my opinion
-Official document
-Udemy
-Youtube
-Blogs
-Discussion platforms like Dev.to ,telegrams groups etc.

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Sarah Chima

Thanks for sharing

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Ricardo Bánffy • Edited

A good REPL
Conference videos (kudos to PyCon, EuroPython, Usenix)
Books
Non-clever source code with good comments

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Sarah Chima

Awesome

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Peggy Sturman

This is a great post. I'm currently trying to conquer JavaScript. Here is the best free JS tutorial I have ever come across. It's pretty amazing and very comprehensive.

javascript.info

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Sarah Chima

Javascript.info is great for anything JavaScript, thanks for sharing Peggy.

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equiman profile image
Camilo Martinez