Over the past few months, I've had more friends and former colleagues reach out about switching to tech from their current careers; this is so thrilling, I've decided to collect a few resources that have been invaluable in my learning path as a software developer!
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To kick things off, this isn't a course I've utilized, but it collects so many key elements of web development for an absurdly low price (if it's not on sale for $10 - $12, check back the next day). The team at Academind makes some top notch courses, this just gathers up some of the greatest hits.
The course, formatted to follow a handy "100 days of code" timeline, will give you a well-rounded look at the building blocks of web development. This would be a great starting point to see which aspects of development appeal to you for deeper learning, or whether you want to reconsider the career move itself!
Academind has a mountain of courses that dive deeply into specific frameworks (I love the course on Angular) and their catalog provides some of the best bang for your buck. In addition, they have a free Discord server to join where you can get feedback and encouragement from fellow students, or advice from the instructors.
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Scrimba is a great platform, since the lessons/projects you work on all happen in an interactive screencast. Unlike Udemy or Youtube, this makes pivoting between looking at a lesson and working through your own coding exercises seamless.
These courses are free and deal with Javascript and a popular library for Javascript called React.
I’d avoid jumping into it before giving a more generalized web dev course a shot, though; Javascript is definitely trickier to learn than other pieces, like HTML and CSS.
If the free courses and learning style on Scrimba click for you, they also have a full front end developer career path that's a great value. You can also skip right past that, use tons of their free courses, and join the excellent Discord community to keep growing your skills and network.
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Codecademy is also a high quality platform. There’s a little quiz on the landing page that can help you see what languages and career paths could be interesting (or, just as important, whether it all sounds terrible to you!)
While it doesn't have interactive screencasts like Scrimba, Codecademy has lots of helpful written explanations and short videos built into the learning process. There are also hints and tricks to help unblock you during exercises.
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Freecodecamp is a real behemoth in the learning space! I'll keep this section vague, but I’m adding it just in case what gets covered in the web dev course sparks an interest in a specific area of software development. At that point, Freecodecamp would be a great resource for deeper learning in specific topics.
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With so many learning platforms and learning styles, figuring out where to get started in learning to code can be a daunting task; if you start feeling analysis paralysis, my best advice would be to get started on any of these platforms;
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