The 2015 workshop has ended. Thank you all for participating! I hope it was interesting to you.

Now that you’ve made your first steps on the path of learning web development (congrats!), it is time for you to venture advance your studies on your own. Don’t sweat it just yet, I know you can do it. And I’ll show you places where you can get the needed information.

Interactive tutorials

The internet is full of self-learning sites where you learn to code by doing sets of exercises in an interactive editor. These can be great first steps into learning a particular language, but usually they don’t have enough material to get you to a professional level. Here are a few examples:

Codecademy

Pros:

  • Good first step for learning a specific language
  • Has most of the popular programming languages
  • Free

Cons:

  • Usually only good for learning the very basics of a language, like syntax.
  • The transition from the comforts of the interactive editor to a real project can be hard and confusing

Codeschool

Pros:

  • Has videos and interactive exercises
  • Has well-defined study paths for specific technologies
  • Has more material (in my opinion) than Codecademy

Cons:

  • Has only a few free courses, most of the content needs a subscription
  • Courses can be short, only giving you an overview of a language/framework

Treehouse

Pros

  • Lots of material
  • Has courses for actual tools used in professional development

Cons

  • Only limited free courses, has a bit pricey subscription plans

Other sites and books

Mooc.fi

Pros

  • Actual, university level courses
  • Free
  • You work with actual editors and tools

Cons

  • Most of the courses are in Finnish
  • Most courses require active participation.

Coursera

Pros

  • Actual courses from top universities around the world
  • Has a lot of courses, for all kinds of subjects (even non-technical)

Cons

  • Most courses require active participation.

Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl

Pros

  • A GREAT book about Ruby on Rails, a popular web application framework
  • Shows you everything you need to get started working on Rails apps
  • Free
  • A thorough way to learn Ruby on Rails

Cons

  • The material can be a bit technical
  • An actual book, so there’s a lot of material and not the quickest way to learn
  • The stuff is mostly for backend development, so if you want to focus on web design and frontend, this is not for you.

You Don’t Know JS book series by Kyle Simpson

Pros

  • A thorough book series about everything in JavaScript
  • All the books are free on GitHub! But you can buy physical copies as well.

Cons

  • Might be a bit technical, assumes some kind of programming knowledge beforehand.

My suggestions

  • Learn version control. Especially Git. Here is a good crash course for it. Also this site has good tutorials.
    • Register to GitHub. Also check their GitHub Pages service.
    • NOTE: You can use version control for other projects as well!
  • Start by doing a course either on Codecademy or Codeschool.
  • Then advance to the books or university courses. On university courses the first week(s) might feel a bit repetitive after Codecademy or Codeschool, but at least you’ll memorize things better.
  • Use Google when you run into problems.
  • Stack Overflow is a great source for help.