Question About Coding Resources

This week’s question comes from Nathan Carrig.

Do you know any good or recommended sites to help designers catch up on today’s coding? There are a lot of sites I come across but many are short on either definition or providing the tutorial’s functional purpose.

Sherpa Chris Casciano answers:

If you’re looking for more content and depth than the typical online tutorial might offer, you’re in luck! Over the last couple of years, there has been an explosion of great online instruction. A few organizations and publications are focusing on using new approaches to online learning and incorporating denser examples, video tutorials and screencasts:

  • With a goal of helping anyone learn to code, Codeacademy offers free step–by–step lessons and outlines for example projects in web fundamentals, JavaScript and jQuery. Once you get past the initial lessons, Codeacademy offers deeper examples to help you write code for forms, charts and even games.
  • If you are after more fundamental principles of programming and designing algorithms, the free computer science courses at Khan Academy may be a good place to start. The courses might not be as project-based or web-focused as the lessons on Codeacademy, but they do provide a solid foundation for folks newer to development.
  • If you want to learn a server-side language like Ruby, the interactive tutorials at RubyMonk are great place to start.
  • Peepcode, and Treehouse both cover coding techniques, as well as other design and business topics. Both resources do have fees associated with them (monthly or per screencast), but each offers great instruction as well as their own different approaches to lessons and interactivity.
  • If the above examples seem like they’re all too developer-oriented, or you feel you need more background first, check out the amazing Don’t Fear the Internet video tutorial series by Jessica Hische and Russ Maschmeyer.

Once you get more comfortable writing code, you then have to keep up with tomorrow’scoding styles and best practices. Just as everyone may have a different style of learning, how to best keep up on changes in our industry may be different for each individual.

Websites and Online Magazines

The same articles and tutorials that weren’t quite deep enough to help you learn how to code in the first place, may now be perfect for learning a new trick or a new feature:

Coding Repositories and Existing Projects

Watching what others are doing and reading through working code can not only reveal new techniques, but also the thought processes involved in developing. Even projects that may not fit your own use cases can be great resources to learn about techniques such as WAI-ARIA, progressive enhancement and other more advanced development:

There are also code and code snippet sharing sites that break down and share code in much smaller chunks. Poke around CodePen and get lost while you see what great things people are doing. Or check out some of the coding ‘advent calendars’ from the recent holiday season: 

Podcasts

As useful as code examples are in the learning process, understanding the foundation of what we do and why we do it is important for keeping up with our industry. Audio podcasts and interviews are great resources for this. Some good podcasts I regularly listen to include: 

Twitter

For my own ongoing education, I’ve discovered that Twitter is very useful. Following awesome people on Twitter means I find out about awesome articles, as well as great examples of coding and design in practice. It may take a little time to curate a low-noise group of people to follow, but you can also use other’s Twitter lists to get you started:

And finally, if the wealth of links above aren’t quite enough ideas to get you going, check out So you want to be a programmer, huh? Here are 27 ways to learn online at The Next Web.