Best and Worst Websites #4
Codecademy: Good
Learning to write code is tedious, time-consuming, and frustrating. Codecademy teaches basic coding by providing short, simple lessons with specific goals and lots of help. There are a lot of learn-on-your-own websites that teach programming and other skills, but I found Codecademy to be the most user-friendly and economical (it's free). Being able to write and run code in the browser, without installing dev kits or plug-ins, makes it easy to drop in for 20-30 minutes of studying and still get a lot done. The feedback is immediate, there are rewards for progress, and the help forum is very easy to navigate should some lesson hold you up.
Design-wise, Codecademy looks and works great. The interface uses intuitive buttons and labels, with a consistent color scheme and typeface. Moving through the menus is quick, and it's easy to get right to what you want to learn. The website is integrated with pretty much every social networking service out there - FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Instagram - making it a nice way to network with people in the software field.
I've been using Codecademy for a few years, and it's definitely helped me get started learning new programming languages and refresh my skills. It's not as in-depth as a college course, or some of the paid sites, like Lynda or Team Treehouse, but using Codecademy has been invaluable to me in furthering my education and career.
Learning to write code is tedious, time-consuming, and frustrating. Codecademy teaches basic coding by providing short, simple lessons with specific goals and lots of help. There are a lot of learn-on-your-own websites that teach programming and other skills, but I found Codecademy to be the most user-friendly and economical (it's free). Being able to write and run code in the browser, without installing dev kits or plug-ins, makes it easy to drop in for 20-30 minutes of studying and still get a lot done. The feedback is immediate, there are rewards for progress, and the help forum is very easy to navigate should some lesson hold you up.
Design-wise, Codecademy looks and works great. The interface uses intuitive buttons and labels, with a consistent color scheme and typeface. Moving through the menus is quick, and it's easy to get right to what you want to learn. The website is integrated with pretty much every social networking service out there - FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Instagram - making it a nice way to network with people in the software field.
I've been using Codecademy for a few years, and it's definitely helped me get started learning new programming languages and refresh my skills. It's not as in-depth as a college course, or some of the paid sites, like Lynda or Team Treehouse, but using Codecademy has been invaluable to me in furthering my education and career.
posted by Nick at 4:54 PM
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