Recently I’ve been working hard to learn how to do some basic back-end programming. There are a ton of tools out there to use and the time seems right to try to build these skills. Here are two I’m using:
Treehouse
Treehouse is the product of the awesome Think Vitamin blog and Carsonified. They have a series of 5-10 minute videos that walk you through many aspects of web design, development, and iOS dev. The videos are super easy to follow and each section presents you with a test to validate you’ve learned what you’re supposed to.
It’s $25/mo and they are continuously adding new videos and subjects. I’ve been using it for a few weeks and have gone through all the HTML/CSS videos to solidify my skills there. Definitely been worth it so far and I’m looking forward to venturing into Ruby very soon.
Stanford’s OpenClassroom
I had heard of Stanford’s OpenClassroom project from a few people, but a friend just sent me a link to it today. Basically Stanford has taken several classes, videotaped them, and uploaded the videos to their site for your viewing. These are some of the best educators on the planet, so it’s safe to assume the material they give out is top-notch. I’ve only watched a few videos so far, but this will definitely supplement my Treehouse learning.
The only problem I see is these lectures are primarily created for a classroom of tuition paying students. It’s an awesome resource, but it’s an “as is” type of education.
There are several more sites out there like Codecademy and Code School that are all working to make us all a little smarter when it comes to being an engineer.
