Whether you’ve seen some of the latest robot or AI Sci-Fi films or you’re simply thinking about a change of career and want to learn to code, freeCodeCamp is an excellent resource to begin your journey into the world of programming, it's available to everyone around the world and at no cost.
freeCodeCamp, which is a little over six years old, boasts more than 40,000 graduates who have gone on to get jobs at big tech firms including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Spotify. It offers a variety of courses which you work through where you'll learn all the relevant information before completing several projects which demonstrate you’ve learned the content - upon completion of the projects, you get a certificate for the course which appears on your public profile.
This approach to teaching programming is great because you end up with five projects per course which can be shown off to prospective employers, who will most likely want to know what you’ve worked on. The courses that are available at the time of writing include:
- Responsive Web Design
- JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures
- Front End Development Libraries
- Data Visualization
- APIs and Microservices
- Quality Assurance
- Scientific Computing with Python
- Data Analysis with Python
- Information Security
- Machine Learning with Python
It’s recommended that you work through the material in order but nobody is stopping you from jumping to other sections first. In addition to the courses, there’s also a section called Coding Interview Prep which contains hundreds of coding challenges that “test your knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and mathematics” as well as additional projects which you can add to your portfolio.
To help you along your coding journey, freeCodeCamp features a very active forum where you can ask questions if you get stuck on any of the tasks or just want to ask about any coding concepts. Once you are thinking about searching for jobs that utilise your new skills, the Career Advice section of the forums can provide you with invaluable information about landing a job.
A few other niceties about the service include that content is available in English, Spanish, and Chinese, there are regular blog posts related to programming from contributors and they’ve created a radio player that loops music “designed for coding” 24/7.
To begin learning, you do not need to create an account but making one is highly recommended so that you can save your progress, earn certificates, and have a public profile page to show off. To learn more about the service, reading the FAQs section is highly recommended.
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