7 Places to Learn to Code – for Free! Over my 10-year internet marketing career, my biggest personal competitive advantage was having an electrical engineering degree and being comfortable doing coding. Nowadays, you don’t have to go back to college (and take on the huge loan or remortgage your house) to get up to speed. The ability to code (and to participate in conversations around programming) is indispensable; it’s not a skill reserved for the uber-geeky. It allows business professionals to identify and quickly resolve issues like a string of wonky HTML in a content management system, to more effectively optimize landing pages, or leverage powerful new AdWords Scripts. It also gives you a unique new perspective in content development, when you understand the inner workings of your systems and can play around in it and get creative. If you want to learn to code, check out these free places to get started: 1. Try Codecademy for Hands-On Basic Coding Experience Codecademy is on a lofty mission to fix education, which they say is broken (whether or not you agree, there’s merit in their statement). Featured in Wired, Bloomberg, The Guardian and dozens of other major publications, it’s one of the more popular free coding options. If you’re looking for theory, this probably isn’t the best place to start. Codecademy’s style is to throw you straight into the deep end of the coding pool with interactive lessons designed to build hands-on experience. You can choose from a variety of courses including HTML & CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Python, Ruby on Rails and more. Here, you’ll learn how to code, but you won’t gain a deep understanding into why you’re doing anything you’re doing. There are other resources for that, but if you’re a marketer or you’re using and HTML-based CMS In your work, hands-on experience is just what you need. 2. For Theory, Head to MIT Open Courseware If you really want to dig into the theory behind coding and better understand the “why,” MIT offers a number of programming courses. Their Open Courseware site features material from 2,150 MIT courses – all open and available to the world. Beginners should start out with the Introduction to Computer Science and Programming course, which requires a commitment of three hours per week. Students communicate with one another using the OpenStudy platform and forums and the course includes video lectures, text resources and an exam. 3. Coding Lessons Gamified with Khan Academy One of the first online resources to offer free coding lessons, Khan Academy has a unique teaching approach that often provides education through gaming elements. Their Computer Programming course is no different. Using drawings, games and animations, Khan Academy teaches JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Students can interact with one another online and even share the work they’ve created. Click Here to know full details : http://tinyurl.com/l3rl