Khan Academy, the innovative online education startup that has drawn backing from Google and Bill Gates, continues to add free online classes on various topics at a blistering rate. In August, its new Computer Science portal drew lots of coverage, featuring online classes on programming and development that anyone can learn from. The actual content on the portal is still taking shape, but in the meantime, there are quite a few resources for learing programming and development online for free. Here are a few.
For beginners, Codeacademy provides very approachable content on how to get started with programming and development. It offers interactive educational modules and you can learn alongside others if you choose.
Open source developers and proprietary developers alike can benefit from Opera Web Standards Curriculum and W3 Schools. Both sites are extremely rich in resources for building best-of-breed online applications.
Opera Web Standards Curriculum was produced by the folks behind the Opera browser in association with the Yahoo! Developer Network. It’s designed as a complete course to teach standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, web design, and JavaScript. It’s a work in progress consisting of many articles. The articles are very in-depth, and cover esoteric topics such as beautifying typography and color theory, in addition to more basic articles about web applications should interact users. Check out this detailed lesson on working with images.
W3Schools has a very exhaustive set of free, hands-on tutorials on both mainstream and esoteric web development topics. You can brush up on CSS, publishing your experiments to actual pages, or walk through examples of how to use everything from AJAX to PHP. Take a gander down the left rail of the home page for how complete the lesson coverage is.
If you’ve got a bit of programming and development savvy already, try some of the lessons at W3Schools. The lessons are very interactive and good. And, very shortly, we can expect Khan Academy’s library of free video lessons on programming and development to start maturing.
