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4 Websites for Learning Javascript, JQuery, Python,HTML, and CSSOctober 1st, 2012 by Aseem Kishore | File in: Reviews (http://helpdeskgeek.com/category/reviews/), Tools Review(http://helpdeskgeek.com/category/free-tools-review/)

If you’re in IT, you probably need to know how to code in at least one language. It’s always a good thing to be able to whip up

some code in Excel or Windows or Javascript or whatever your environment is. At my old company, I used to program in C#

mostly until on day we had a write a giant web app in HTML 5 and Javascript. I’ve done both in the past, but I definitely

needed to brush up on my coding skills.

There are some cool free online tools you can use to practice your coding skills in different web programming languages. In

this article, I’ll go through a couple that I have used and can vouch for. If you have used a different site or service, feel free to

post a comment here and let us know.

Codecademy (http://www.codecademy.com/)

This is probably the most popular online tool for learning to code. It’s completely free, has a ton of tutorials and is very social

integrated. The best part about it is that it’s very hands-on. All the lessons include a coding window where you actually type in

the code and can run it.

Codecademy has courses on Javascript, Python, Web Fundamentals (HTML, CSS), and JQuery. It also has a lot of social features

and you can see how you are doing compared to them. Also, it has a very detailed tracking system that keeps track of your

progress, so you can come back at any time and start from where you left off.

Overall, it’s definitely one of the best ways to learn to code or to brush up on your coding skills. They provide full real-world

courses that start from the basics and go all the way to developing fully interactive web sites running Javascript, JQuery and

more.

Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/)

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Khan Academy just recently added a whole new section on computer science. If you haven’t been to Khan Academy, it’s all

about learning through videos and interaction. The new Computer Science section is currently all based on Javascript, but they

do a fantastic job. What’s really cool about this site is that it also has the code window, which you can use to type and run

code, but also has a video that plays along and dynamically adds code to the window as you play the video.

I found these synced video tutorials with the live coding box to be extremely helpful, even more so than using Codecademy. Of

course, Khan Academy doesn’t have nearly as many tutorials, but that’s because it’s just starting out. Give it a year or so and

they’ll probably be hundreds of tutorials on many different languages.

Treehouse (http://teamtreehouse.com/)

Treehouse is a paid site that I used while working at my company and it was pretty awesome, especially since I didn’t have to

pay for it. It costs either $25 a month or $50, depending on what services you want, but they have over 550 courses and a

very cool live coding engine like the other two sites mentioned above.

I liked Treehouse because it had a lot of real-world tutorials like building a simple version of Facebook, an e-commerce

website, building a responsive design website, etc. Of course, they also have in-depth tutorials on HTML 5, CSS 3, Ruby on

Rails, etc. If you are interested in Android or iOS programming, they also have courses on those topics.

Google Code University(http://code.google.com/edu/courses.html#ajax_programming)

After the three mentioned above, we now get into the standard text way of learning. There is no interactive coding window or

anything like that. There aren’t even any videos! It’s still a good resource, just boring since it’s mostly reading. Now that I’ve

gotten used to these interactive coding windows, it’s hard going back to just reading code and then having to type it in a code

editor, compile it, run it, etc, etc.

There aren’t a lot of courses, but you can learn some Java, C++, Python, CSS, HTML, Javascript, etc. It’s obviously more

geared towards Google software and services, so if you want to program for Android or learn to use Google APIs, then this is a

good place to start.