Best Online Courses for Upgrading Your Coding Skills

Looking for a new challenge or just trying to improve your development skills? You can check out these online courses focused on coding.

It seems that with every passing day, learning to code becomes more like learning how to write. It doesn’t matter if your coding is advanced or if you can’t code at all, you always thrive to know more or do better. If you think it’s time for a new challenge, check out the following websites that may surprise you in terms of how much they can offer for so little or even for free. After all, knowing more than you already do can’t be a bad thing, right?

Smashing Magazine

You’ve surely heard of Smashing Magazine and one time or another stumbled upon one of their articles. Smashing Magazine is not literally a magazine, but it is a website full of original and very good content, where you can sit for hours just scrolling through articles that grasp your attention. It is also a very good place to learn new things and stay up to date, no matter if you’re a web designer or a programmer.

There are many tutorials that are aimed mainly at an intermediate to advanced level of coding knowledge, or higher. From HTML, CSS and JS, to UI/UX, Photoshop and WordPress, there is a vast library of tutorials for diverse needs.

Codecademy

If you think about reviewing your own skills, you may find that you may handle CSS and HTML very well, but you are a bit shaky on JS. Maybe you have a pretty solid idea about Ruby, but you would like to know more, or you simply want to cover the basics once more.

Codecademy is probably the most well-known free online course platform, and for a good reason. Clean and modern, it bares only the essentials and invites you to try out something from its wide range of offerings. If only out of curiosity, anyone should give it a try.

Udacity

Udacity is less a classic course platform as it is an interactive space for a more contemporary approach to learning. It probably has the most video based learning process of all the platforms and offers many courses on advanced. It also stays up to date on subjects that you can hardly find on other platforms.

If you are less of a classic learner or have an auditory type of memory, Udacity is definitely the place you should check out. Although it doesn’t have courses organized on domains, you will find many videos full of explanations and expert advice from leading people in your chosen industry.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a very friendly place to learn anything. It gained a massive amount of users through its oferrings and, after introducing the Computer Programming section, that number skyrocketed. The courses are not for advanced users, but more for beginners to intermediate, as they also cover programming basics and basic HTML and CSS. But there is an extensive course on JS, that includes canvas drawing and animation.

Khan Academy also has a badge reward system that makes you feel like you are taking a course at Hogwarts, making it really fun to earn different badges for pretty much anything (even for being a good listener!).

Treehouse

Another big and well-known platform, Treehouse is packed with courses and tutorials about pretty much anything from CSS3 to jQuery, Ruby on Rails, iOS and Databases. Treehouse also offers a workspace where you can create your own projects and it’s a very good place to look if you want to learn something specific, because you can find whole courses focusing solely on a major task, like creating a website from scratch.

For every course you can try the first stage for free and there is a 25$ monthly fee if you want to go further. The paid option includes all the courses on the platform.

WebdesignTuts+

Want to learn CMS and Sound Design on the same platform? Well, you are in luck, because Tuts+ has a very diverse and interactive array of subjects in domains ranging from Design & Illustration, to Photo and Video, Business, Music, Motion Graphics, or Game Development.

Although it’s not free, a monthly fee of 15$ covers a whole lot of domains and not only courses. The platform is divided in How-To Tutorials, Courses and eBooks. Not sure? You can start a 10 day trial to see if Tuts+ is what you’re looking for.