I admit I never enjoyed coding. Somehow, the word "codes" reminds me of super introverted geeky hippies who look just like Frank character from 30 Rock.
Long story short, I have been running away from any
computer science classes all the way through college and graduate school. And now I couldn't run away anymore. I felt like I have become programmingly-illiterate without knowing how to speak Python, HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, SQL, NoSQL (@?@?@?@), Hadoop, so on. Gosh, why are there so many languages? When I was a kid, I thought I could get away knowing just Burmese and English in my life.
Anyway.... So I went through the same procedure......got a bunch of "For dummies" books, downloaded iTunesU courses and signed myself up in edX and coursera. Those failed miserably, of course, due to their lack of attractiveness.
Then I stamped onto a gem website called Codeacademy. Unlike any other online classes or books, I found Codeacademy to be very user-friendly, fun, interactive and effective. Whoever teaching the class did a very great job designing the class.The instructions are clear. I especially like about having to do hands-on coding exercises to go to the next lesson. Those exercises were hard enough to give my brain some sort of thinking, and yet easy enough for me to get it correct and gain self-confidence. I always hated how "For dummies" books would already say "<html>Congratulations! You are now an expert web developer.</html>" in Chapter 1 and how all the other classes assumed you already knew a language.
I have mentioned what I like about Codeacademy already. Here's are what I wish from Codeacademy. I wish it has more languages in the near future (not that I haven't gotten a full plate already just from the current 6 courses). But hey, maybe there is someone out there who needs to learn a different language. I also wish that they posted more projects as examples.
Unrelated fact: it seems that almost all Codeacademy team members are either 1st or 2nd generation or even non Americans, which makes it look more American that way.
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