Best Free Coding Resources & Tutorials

Many professionals are eager to learn to code but hesitate because of the perceived up-front costs. They may see the prices of some bootcamps and feel unsure if they want to pursue a coding career. However, a surprising amount of free resources are available to help beginners test the waters without needing to spend any money to start. This guide will teach you about the different types of free coding resources and tutorials available.

What is Coding?

Coding is one of the most in-demand skills dominating today’s job market. In simple terms, coding is the language that tech professionals use to tell devices how they should operate. There are several coding languages that are used for different purposes; some of the more common languages include Java, Python, and JavaScript.

Coding skills are required in many positions, including Software Engineer, Full Stack Developer, Cybersecurity Analyst, Machine Learning Engineer, and many others. The main upside of coding is that it’s also adaptable to nearly any industry, including education, fashion, finance, medicine, entertainment, and marketing. While it may seem complicated to break into a coding career, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Nowadays, anyone can become a coder and obtain an entry-level position after taking a coding bootcamp or two.

Read more about what coding is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Coding?

Coding is an incredibly versatile field that covers a wide selection of topics. You’ll be able to create websites, algorithms, and programs that have uses in every industry on the market. Even if your chosen career operates primarily in-person, you’ll be able to take creative approaches to coding that will make everyone’s lives easier.

You can make your own video game, build an online presence for your small business, or code simple programs that automate your mundane tasks. There’s no limit to what you can do with coding. This impressive skill will always serve you well if you have an imaginative mind and a willingness to learn more.

Choose Your Subject

Plenty of resources are available to help with your coding journey, so you’ll want to narrow down which ones are relevant to your future coding career. Whether you’re a high schooler who wants to code or someone with no experience in coding who wants to build a website, you’ll be able to find the best tools for your goals.

Before you look for free resources, it might help to find coding classes with subjects that interest you first. You don’t have to sign up right away—bookmark it for later and use it as a reference to guide your thoughts. Make a list of the recurring programming languages or topics you want to explore. That will simplify your search and make the process less stressful.

Free Online Coding Courses

The first step to finding free resources is to locate video tutorials that will allow you to test the waters. The best part of these online courses is that you can take them repeatedly to perfect your skills at no cost. From there, you’ll be able to enroll in a full-scale coding course without worrying about feeling lost.

Most beginners have an easier time starting with front end web development, the parts of websites people see and use on a surface level. Noble Desktop’s Intro to Front End Web Development course covers its features' basics and its three programming languages: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. JavaScript is well-known for its frameworks, libraries, and databases. There are dozens of them you can choose to study. Noble’s introductory courses to React and SQL will point you in the right direction, and you can branch out into other JavaScript tools from there.

Are you interested in data, machine learning, or algorithms? If you are, you’re looking for the Intro to Python Fundamentals class, which teaches the basics of those topics. If you already have a foundation in these subjects but want to take it a step further, you can try the tutorial that covers Web Development with Python and Django.

Games That Teach You Coding

Coding can feel hard to break into when you’re first starting. Why not make it fun? Playing games is one of the best ways to learn because you’ll develop your coding skills through practice.

CSS Diner is a 32-Level game that has you serve plates of food by coding with CSS. If you’ve learned CSS through the free web development class, this game will feel relatively simple, but it’s an excellent practice that will reinforce your knowledge without needing to build a website from scratch. You can play this game right in your browser.

It’s harder to practice JavaScript without working on a project. Elevator Saga, another free in-browser game, asks you to use JavaScript to code an elevator to follow specific instructions. The game's goal is to create a functioning algorithm that allows the elevator to operate while ensuring that people using the elevator don’t have to wait too long before it arrives on their floor.

You might want to practice a game in another programming language, and that’s where CodinGame is a gift for many. This free game allows you to play various games in different coding languages, and you can jump between them as you please. Competitive players can boast their coding skills by getting on the public leaderboard. It’s also in-browser, similar to the two previously mentioned games.

Expand Your Skills

Coding has different avenues that overlap and intersect into many unique tracks. Once you master one coding skill, you can enter another class with a different coding subject and absorb its concepts faster due to your newfound programming background. Coding gets easier the more you learn, and since free resources are accessible to anyone, there’s no reason to wait any longer.

You can learn more about coding through Noble Desktop’s coding blog and the Coding Learn Hub.