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What Are Your Favourite Learning Resources?

Sarah Chima on September 26, 2018

Let us play a game. It is called 'My favourite learning resources'. Here is how it is played: We share learning resources we love as developers or ...
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Harish Garg

Been at this from so many years and learned and dabbled in so many different languages and technologies, that now more specific "how-tos" work better for me than from the scatch resources.

Given that, here are some I have found it very useful.

StackOverflow
The best resource is the generosity of random strangers in places like stackoverflow.com, both who have posted the question as well as people who have answered. There is almost nothing you can't find a solution to.

httpsiseasy.com/
This is one of the best examples of how to build a learning resource for a particular practical goal in mind. I went from having a non-https website to an https in 10 mins.

From past experience, years back, when I was trying to learn python, the best resource I found was learnpythonthehardway.org/

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juniusfree • Edited

I'm a newbie in web dev and in programming in general. I'm learning HTML/CSS.

Learning resources:

Tools:

  • Anki - flash card
  • Zeal - offline documentation browser

Strategies:

  • Spend more time in building stuff than just reading or watching tutorials.
  • Learn and do something that is beyond my comfort zone.
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Aldo Ortiz

I can't use frontloops.io, because that's $19 each practice set.

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Pavon Dunbar

In no order:

Team Treehouse
Udemy
YouTube Channels
MDN

And I'm open to other resources that will make me a better developer. I will never claim to be an expert because the technological landscape is ever changing; so there is always something to learn.

That's what I love about this amazing and dynamic field.

Pavon

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Sarah Chima

These are great resources Pavon. Thanks for sharing.

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Matt Studdert

Great resources Sarah! 🙌

There are so many great resources I decided to list them on my website Frontend Mentor.

I listed all of the ones that have helped me or my students before that are either completely free or have decent free options.

A couple of favourites from the list are:

  • freeCodeCamp
  • Udacity
  • Wes Bos (great teaching style)

I'll be updating the whole site next week, including the resources page. So, while dev.to is currently not one of the resources on the live site (sorry everyone 😬), it will be added next week and would definitely be one of my favourite resources!

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Avery

To learn a new language beyond the syntax: exercism.io

Free, Feedback from real people as you go, tons of examples and community support

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Sarah Chima

I've never heard of Exercism.io before now. Thanks for sharing

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Sergio Daniel Xalambrí

I made a post on my blog with a big list of resources to learn from: "How to keep updated with the JavaScript ecosystem?"

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atrooo • Edited

I don't know why I've never knew that freeCodeCamp has such thorough curriculums. That's so great!

Lots of people have mentioned MDN, its good.

Hackerrank is one I used when I was teaching myself Python. Its great because it teaches you by giving you a conceptual snippet and then a problem to solve with an integrated code editor. The downside is the problems are written and created by the community so sometimes the quality is bad. Oh and they have regular competitions and offer services to connect you with companies looking to hire coders.

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Jasper Stephenson

It's not web development, but when I was trying to learn Unity and its flavor of C#, following along with this channel's well-paced, friendly, fun videos made learning a breeze! Highly recommend his "Breakfast with Unity" series that has ~15 minute micro-projects where you can learn one specific skill at a time, and always make something awesome in the end.
PushyPixels on Youtube

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Sarah Chima

Great, thanks for sharing this.

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Paul Lefebvre

I'm biased, but I think these are all useful regardless of the language you want to ultimately use:

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Scott Mallon • Edited

In no particular order:

Udemy
YouTube (Ben Awad, Derek Banas, Tim Corey, Hamza Mirzer, Traversy, LayoutLand)
Stack Overflow (For more opinionated question/answer topics)
w3schools.org
MDN
Books
GitHub Documentation

Jen Simmons on LayoutLand is an incredible resource for CSS tutorials, especially the new Grid level 1 system, still learning it:

youtube.com/watch?v=FEnRpy9Xfes&t=...

I initially learned React from Hamza Mirza on YouTube. Great channel. This is a link for one of the best react tutorials out there, in the opinion of someone who knew nothing of react (besides its utility as a SPA library) before watching this video:

youtube.com/watch?v=204C9yNeOYI

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Aswath KNM

YouTube YouTube and stack overflow

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kaelscion

heck yeah for YouTube man. Sentdex is one of my favorites. Quirky delivery, easy to follow code examples, and playing Starcraft 2 against an AI he developed and trained for that purpose as we watched. Great stuff.

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Sarah Chima

Nice!!!

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Nishanth Banda

This is such a cool idea, thanks for the tips everyone!.

If anyone is looking for a good place to refresh your Sorting Algorithms and Data Structures (Especially Linked Lists) and also pointers.
I highly recommend mycodeschool (youtube.com/channel/UClEEsT7DkdVO_...).

I was struggling with Linked Lists as a concept when i stumbled upon this series. It helped me gain confidence to write my own implementations later on.

Cheers! and keep putting great stuff.

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Philip Hallstrom

For quickly getting the gist of a language... learnxinyminutes.com

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Sarah Chima

Great

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Xavier • Edited

I have tried a lot of resources and I think that udemy, books and freecodecamp has the best quality/price relation. Also find codepen.io a very useful tool when researching for specific frontend features and as a sandbox for developing. It allows you to try and error faster that any other tool that I am aware of.

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Christian Vasquez • Edited

I would say...

  1. Udacity
  2. Udemy
  3. Documentation
  4. DEV posts
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Joe Hobot

My fav is the free language learning books , all shared on GitHub

Here is example for python free books.

Github Free Books

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Gabriela Amundarain • Edited

Besides the aforementioned FreeCodeCamp (and this website, of course) I discovered bento.io not long ago – it's a collection of resources/tutorials on most web dev topics that I've found pretty helpful.

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Anna Simoroshka

No one mentioned FrontendMasters, so I will. If I need to dive into some topic or area I prefer to have a thorough course with videos and a lot of materials to work with. This way I can build a solid structure in my head and fill it later with docs, SO, and random googling.
They have great JS courses with different levels of complexity and courses about frameworks, CSS, testing, and other things.

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Maciek Chmura

I think nobody mentioned this course:
CS50
It's great for fundamental knowledge.

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kaelscion

Excellent list of resources for sure! I remember Codecademy when it was 6 months old and had barely any content. I followed your link and was pleasantly surprised to see how far they've come!

Also +1 on giving love to official docs. If I have a choice, I would much rather comb the docs to find an answer than use SE or SO, but only because I will 100% forget an answer somebody has given me, but will 100% remember how to solve a problem I figured out for myself. As for me, my list is as follows:

Flask Web Development: The Flask Mega Tutorial is, hands down, the best and most comprehensive Python Web development tutorial out there. I've been writing Python code for 5+ years and developing with Flask for close to 4, and i STILL refer to this tutorial almost every time I build something with Flask! Sure, the author, Miguel Grinberg's photo on that tutorial makes one a bit nervous, simply because it makes him look like the cyber criminal villain of a Mission Impossible movie that is holding the world's networks hostage. Over the years he's iterated the tutorial to keep up with Flask and Python. Plus he responds to comments and emails so, if he really has masterminded a Fire Sale, at least he's nice about it :P

Treehouse: All Things Web+

My wife and I freelance together as a designer and developer tag team and Treehouse has been a huge part of us keeping current. It is a pay-for service, but its only about $25/month and that gives you unlimited access to tons and tons of courses on ML, Python Web Development, JS Web Development, SEO, Responsive Web Design, Digital Literacy, Database Design, Swift for iOS, Angular2+, and the list goes on. All the teachers of the on-demand courses that we have taken were members of the community they were teaching; either as core developers to the framework/language, or somebody who worked in the wild with that technology in its current form, every day. While keeping up can be hard with rapid changes, I have grown to really prefer Treehouse over reading countless blog posts that, unfortunately, can conflict on the details of functions or conventions just enough to be quite confusing. Treehouse hasn't done that to us so far. Therefore, we love it.

Coursera: Real College Courses for free!?!

Real college professors, from schools you have ACTUALLY heard of, teaching all sorts of stuff, from CS to art, to music, to history, and its free. Yeah. Pretty much.

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Peggy Sturman

This is a great post. I'm currently trying to conquer JavaScript. Here is the best free JS tutorial I have ever come across. It's pretty amazing and very comprehensive.

javascript.info

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Sarah Chima

Javascript.info is great for anything JavaScript, thanks for sharing Peggy.

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Ricardo Bánffy • Edited

A good REPL
Conference videos (kudos to PyCon, EuroPython, Usenix)
Books
Non-clever source code with good comments

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Sarah Chima

Awesome

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/[Abejide Femi Jr]\s/

Udemy(i go for the highest rated courses)
MDN
FrontEnd masters
programmingwithmosh.com
Pluralsight

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Sarah Chima

Thanks for sharing this

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Matthew Francis

We use W3Schools a lot at college.

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Logan Helms

Safari Books Online and Udemy. Udemy gets you up and going fast. Safari allows you to deep dive.

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Sarah Chima

Awesome

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Robert
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Sarah Chima

Nice

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Rupesh Krishna Jha

In my opinion
-Official document
-Udemy
-Youtube
-Blogs
-Discussion platforms like Dev.to ,telegrams groups etc.

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Sarah Chima

Thanks for sharing

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Tomer Ben David

YouTube :)

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Debashis Dip

In no order what so ever.

  • Official docs
  • Coursera
  • Edx
  • TutorialsPoint
  • MDN
  • Codeacademy
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Burhoniddin

repl.it
w3schools.com
codewars.com
devdocs.io

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Camilo Martinez
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Segun Olaiya

😗 YouTube | YouTube | Youtube 😗

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John Paul Ada

I have a list of them here: awesome-learning-collections. 😄

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Sarah Chima

Thank you John for sharing

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APixel Visuals

I learned JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and MySQL on Codecademy. Highly recommend it to any newbies.

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Luis Miguel • Edited

Coursera is a good resource to learn the basics of computer science theory.....

I'd like to recommend this course:

coursera.org/learn/programming-lan...

It's f****** awesome!!

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Owen Crabtree

I like Codecademy, The New Boston on Youtube (youtube.com/user/thenewboston), Stack Oveerflow and Egghead.io (only used it a bit but like it so far 😊)