Email article
A lot of people want to know how to program but don’t know where to start. It’s a complicated and confusing topic, and there are hundreds of guides teaching dozens of languages. However, a new company called Codecademy has taken a lot of the uncertainty and doubt away from learning to program in its year-long course Code Year.
What Is Code Year?
Code Year is simply a (free) initiative by Codecademy that provides weekly lessons on programming, currently focusing on JavaScript. Through Code Year, every week subscribers receive a new link in their inbox asking them to take the week’s course in JavaScript, like the following:
Getting Started
That code in first screenshot in this article (the upper right) may look a little complicated. But that’s because I’ve been using Code Year for over eight weeks and have had a chance to challenge myself. You can do the same.
When you first start, you’ll be introduced to basic things like syntax and functions:
Most of the time weeks are divided into around seven sections, which is helpful for pacing yourself (you can just do one section per day). However, if you are starting now you’ll want to do finish the lessons faster then you normally would because Code Year is already eight weeks in and you have a bit of catching up to do:
Even though there is a lot of stuff, you’ll find yourself desiring to go through it all quickly. It’s like how you want to keep turning the pages of a good book. And go ahead, that’s fine!
Every week things will get more and more complicated as you learn and begin to understand more code. This past week users created a mini blackjack game:
All in all, Code Year is a great way to learn to program, given that you’re motivated enough. Especially since it is free.
Signing up
So where do you sign to begin? You sign no where. All you have to do is head to Codecademy’s homepage and start typing — the window on the left of the homepage is a real, working console:
As you finish steps/lessons, you will be asked to progress to the next lesson until you catch up to the latest one. Then you wait until the next lesson is out (they are released weekly). If you want to receive weekly e-mail reminders about new lessons, you can signup for notifications from Code Year’s homepage:
Conclusion
As you can see, Codecademy has definitely made it easy to get started with learning programming and an overall fun task for all. I’ve had a really great time learning to program JavaScript and hope that the program continues on for as long as it takes for me to become an expert!
You can get started with Codecademy and Code Year from the links below:
