Whether you want to build a website for yourself, create an app or pursue a well paid developer career - you can start by utilising some free tools to get you going. Coding is a great skill and it can be learned with some effort. Maybe you think coding is only for computer geeks - it’s not. Thousands of people in the world will start learning to code today and you can be one of them!

Learning can be much easier and faster if you have the right “teacher”, whether it is a program, video tutorial, or a real person guiding you. To help you find your path we collected and reviewed some of the best free coding resources. For your convenience we made a list so you can easily choose a coding course depending on your preferences and your current level of skills. Our list is sectioned into three categories:

“Best coding resources for beginners” - resources in this section are suitable for complete beginners, who want to have hands on experience and start learning fast.

“Full path from beginner to developer” in this section we selected courses who have full curriculum of skills, that you need to master to become a web developer.

“Learn programming skills” The last section has great resources suitable not only for beginners. And it is advised to be chosen by people who already know what programming language or skill they want to learn.

On the end of our list we added one bonus resource which could not be squeezed into one single category.

Best coding resources for beginners

https://www.codecademy.com/ One of the most popular coding schools in the world. With more than 25 million learners, it is a really great place to start for beginners. It offers interactive, easy to follow courses with a built in text editor. Apart from just teaching programing languages there are some useful courses on responsive design, Git, Sass and how to deploy a website. Codecademy hooks you on learning as you progress by gamifying their courses with a point system and badges.

Courses on codecademy takes from 2 to 13 hours to accomplish, depending on the subject you select. And in that time you will get the basics of selected programing language. This is a good stepping stone and with the acquired basic knowledge you can continue learning by starting some projects of your own.  

Skills: HTML & CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, ReactJS, AngularJS, Java, Ruby on rails, Git, SQL
Price: Free

https://www.sololearn.com Sololearn is the largest community of mobile code learners with 17 million Students. You can start by installing an app on your phone (Android or iOS) or just take the same course on your  laptop.

Sololearn courses are a good start for beginners. It covers basic features of selected programing language in a fun and interactive way -  you are learning by going through instructional lessons and solving interactive quizzes where you can collect points. This gamification factor helps you keep on learning. Plus if you like doing things on your phone Sololearn is definitely worth trying out.

Skills: C++, Java, Python 3, JavaScript, PHP, C#, Swift, Ruby, jQuery, HTML, CSS, SQL
Price: Free

https://www.khanacademy.org Khanacademy is a good online learning platform, offering a wide variety of free online courses on different subjects. There are some great step by step interactive courses on HTML/CSS and Javascript, that will help you start the web developer path. Some of the courses are even suitable for kids.

Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL
Price: Free

Full path from beginner to developer

https://www.freecodecamp.org/ This code camp offers comprehensive courses on coding. Learning is divided into three major stages: Front End Development, Data Visualisation and Back End Development. To accomplish each stage and get a certificate you will have to study somewhere from 200 to 400 hours. To finish these courses you’ll need some serious efforts and commitment. But the vast community of 113,700 learners will be by your side, helping you accomplish exercises, find solutions and keep you going strong.

At freecodecamp your journey begins from a complete beginner and can take you to a quite sophisticated coder level which can contribute to open source projects. And after you get your certifications in Front End, Data Visualisation and Back End Development you are allowed to take on non profit projects.This will help you to boost your experience as a coder, face real life programming problems, and give you a better chance of getting a coder job.

Skills: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Git, Node.js, React.js, D3.js, Databases
Price: Free

https://www.theodinproject.com/  This is a free online coding bootcamp that focuses on web development. The project has a step by step curriculum so there won’t be any issues of not knowing what to learn and what to build. During the course you will make projects and build up a real portfolio on Github. To stay motivated and learn faster the Odin project encourages connecting with other students and learn along side one another.

After you finish the programming part of the course there is a "Getting Hired as a Web Developer" section to help you get a developer job.

Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Ruby and Ruby on Rails
Price: Free

Learn programming skills

https://www.edx.org/  Edx is an open source online education project founded by the Harvard University and MIT in 2012. It offers high-quality courses from the world’s best universities for students everywhere.

There are 400 different courses under the “computer science” category, teaching various programming languages, tools and skills for different knowledge level students - from beginner to advanced. And if you need to showcase your skills you can get a verified certificate for a fee of 99$.  If you don’t need a certificate learning is FREE. Edx is definitely one of the best places to go, if you want to learn something for free and with 10 million learners worldwide it will certainly be worthwhile.   

Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, ReactJS, Node.js, Ruby on Rails ASP.NET, Java, C#, C++, Python, and many more
Price: Free to learn / Pay for certificate

www.udemy.com If you like watching video tutorials, then Udemy is a great place to learn. Although Udemy offers a lot of Paid courses, there is a big section of really great free courses on programming, web development, Android or iOS development and more. Oh and if you are still here i’ll give you one more tip: before enrolling on courses you can check reviews and ratings of each course and find the best one for you.

Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, .NET, Python, Ruby on Rails, ReactJS, AngularJS, Objective-C, C#, C++, SQL Java, Git, and more.
Price: Paid and Free

https://www.udacity.com Udacity was created by Stanford University professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig with a mission to bring affordable and highly effective higher education. Udacity offers hundreds of different courses created by top educators and leading industry engineers. A big part of the courses are called “nanodegrees” that prepare you for specific careers like Web developer, Data analyst or Mobile Developer. Nanodegrees require a tuition fee but you can access course material for free with a 7-day free trial.

Apart from “nanodegrees” there are some really great completely FREE courses. You just have to search through their catalog and find what you want. The variety is huge, starting from “Intro to JavaScript” to “Artificial Intelligence for Robotics”. Even advanced coders can find an interesting and useful courses here.

Skills: HTML, CSS, Java, Android, JavaScript, jQuery, Backbone.js, AJAX, Xcode, Ruby, Git, Python, Swift, SQL, MongoDB and more.
Price: Paid and Free

https://www.codewars.com/ They successfully made learning to code fun! Codewars dares you to learn by doing challenges called “kata” (as forms in karate). You can solve one challenge at a time and improve your programming skills. As you progress you get new ranks and titles and harder challenges. Eventually, you are allowed to create your own katas and challenge others. Codewars allows you to interact with your peer learners. At the end of every challenge, you can compare your solution to others and discuss what’s the best way to solve your programming problems.

Skills: Clojure, C, C++, Crystal, Dart, Elixir, F#, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Shell, SQL, Swift, Typescript
Price: Free

https://ocw.mit.edu MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers virtually all MIT course content. You can access them at any time anywhere for FREE! In a huge list of MIT courses there are some computer science ones. So if you already have some basics and you want to know more theory behind it, you can check out these MIT courses:  Introduction to Programming in Java, A Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python , Introducing to Computer Science and Programming in Python , Practical Programming in C , Introduction to C++

Skills: Java, Python, C, C++
Price: Free

Bonus Resource

https://www.liveedu.tv/ LiveEdu.tv is a live streaming platform for people to share code, exchange programming experiences, and socialize, all while improving their coding. Since the beta launch in the end of 2015 LiveEdu quickly gained popularity and has already been watched by over 1 million people.

If you want to watch people coding live, you just need to sign up for a free account and start viewing immediately. For most programing languages you can find all levels of tutorials, from beginner to expert.

Skills: PHP, JavaScript, Python, Java, C,  C++, HTML, CSS, Android, Ruby, Node.js, ReactJS, AngularJS, Django, Swift, SQL and many more.
Price: Free / Pay for Pro account

Conclusion

There are tons of free resources online to learn coding and i hope this list will help for you choose. Unfortunately there are no secret pill yet, which could teach you instantly. Learning takes time, commitment and patience. If you don’t like traditional courses maybe the best way to learn coding for you is by taking on a project and learning while you progress? (For this type of learning Stackoverflow is one of the best places).

Choose something that you think suits you the most, stick to it and have fun.

If you have suggestions that should be on the list, please write it in the comment section we will be glad to hear your opinion and update it.