10 Awesome Free Courses for Devs by Devs

This article was originally published on The Smart Coder

Learning to code and becoming a web developer is one of the best decisions you can make these days. And luckily there are tons of material, often in the form of courses to help you with that. To help you discover awesome courses covering different programming languages and technologies, I have curated this list of 10 fantastic courses for beginners.

I am not affiliated with any of the creators and don't receive any compensation or anything like that. This is just a list of 10 of my favorite courses that I want to share with you!

JavaScript 30

Let's start with a real burner. The JavaScript 30 course by the amazing Wes Bos is just awesome. During this course that spans over 30 days, you are going to build 30 vanilla javascript projects. That means no frameworks, libraries, compilers, or boilerplates. Just plain, vanilla JS. This is an awesome course to practice the basics of JavaScript, add cool things to your portfolio, and become better in JS! Almost 400,000 developers have taken this course and you should be next!

If you need more inspiration for cool javascript projects check out this post!

Link to course

Beginner's Guide to React w/ Hooks

Many of you know Colt Steele for his fantastic Udemy courses and his boot camp (with job-guarantee!). And because Colt cares for the community he created a free introduction course to React. In almost 2 and a half hours Colt is going to show you the basics of React including React Hooks.

Functional Components? Check!
JSX? Check!
Props & State? Check, Check!
Styling in React? Also, Check!

There are of course longer courses that go much more into detail. But for beginners, this course is extremely valuable and a solid foundation to dig deeper into React!

If you want to learn more about React Hooks and want to become a better React Developer, check out these posts!

Link to course

Vue JS 3 Tutorial for Beginners

Vue.js is almost as popular as React and even got more stars on GitHub! So learning Vue is always a good choice and this course for beginners by Shaun Pelling (The Net Ninja) might well be your kickstart into a successful developer career! It teaches Vue.js 3, the brand new version that was released not long ago, and explains the basic concepts very well. It covers topics such as:

• Routing
• Vue CLI
• Fetching Data
• Composition API (Brand new!)
• ...

Shaun also got a more in-depth course on Udemy (paid) if you want to dig deeper into Vue.js. Here are some more free Vue resources for you.

Link to course

Python for Beginners

Python is one of the hottest programming languages to learn right now. Besides web development, Python is often used for machine learning and data science, professions with high demand, and even higher salaries!

This course (5 hours long) by Mosh Hamedani who is well-known for his fantastic courses and what he does for the community is a perfect introduction to the Python language. Mosh is going to teach you things like:

• Variables
• Types
• Functions
• Loops
• Classes
• ...

and much more. He also provides you with three cool Python projects to practice what you learned.

So if you want a career in ML or Data Science, Python is the right choice and this course can be where it all starts!

Link to course

The Flutter Email Course

Flutter is Google's open-source UI Development Kit for building awesome, cross-platform applications in the Dart programming language. According to a recent Stackoverflow survey, Flutter is the #4 most-loved framework by developers.

But how can you get started with Flutter? Let me introduce you to Andrea Bizzotto, an absolute expert when it comes to Flutter & Dart. And luckily for us, Andrea recently created a free Flutter Course in the form of a newsletter to help you become versatile Flutter developers.

During 15 days you will get 15 emails, one a day covering different topics. Each email is containing a brief intro, links to the most important resources, and a small challenge to test your knowledge.

The course covers topics like:

• Flutter state management
• Data Persistence
• Animations
• Platform Channels,
• Testing
• CI/CD
• ...

It's a great way to get started with Flutter and you can enhance your knowledge afterward on your own or by checking out more of Andrea's great courses!

Link to course

Node.js Course for Beginners

Node.js is slowly becoming the number one choice for many developers when building APIs and writing server-side code. Many corporations integrate Node in their tech stacks because it's based on JavaScript and uses Google's V8 engine. It's also a good choice if you want to become a full-stack developer because you can use a frontend framework like React and code everything in JS.

In this introductory course, NoobCoder will provide you with a solid overview of the features of Node.js. He covers topics such as:

• File system
• Streams & pipes
• Creating HTTP servers
• Express framework
• User Input Validation
• Routing
• ...

All in all, it's a good start into the world of Node.js. Even though the course is from 2018, most of the things are still valid today. And if you are serious about working with Node.js, you need additional resources and practice anyway.

Link to course

TypeScript Course for Beginners

TypeScript is one of the most loved programming languages for many developers according to a recent Stackoverflow survey. It combines the beauty of JavaScript with strong typing and modern compiler features. Angular and Nest.js make heavy use of TypeScript and helped it gaining popularity.
If you haven't tried out TypeScript yet, I recommend you to do so. I know many developers that once they have touched TS never want to go back to writing pure JS.
And if you want to watch a course to learn the basics of TypeScript I got something for you. This course by Maximilian Schwarzmüller (famous for his brilliant Udemy courses) is exactly what you need.
The quality is top-notch (Max-Standard) and the course covers topics like:

• Introduction to TS
• Types
• Tuples & Enums
• Functions
• Compilation
• ...

Link to course

HTML Crash Course for Absolute Beginners

When you are new to web development, people will often advise you to start with the basics. And by that, they usually mean HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That often makes sense because when you are building, let's say a house, you won't start with the interior without having at least some walls first. Think of HTML & CSS as the basic structure for any website.

So if you want to get started with web development and know absolutely nothing about HTML, this great course by Brad Traversy (a.k.a. Traversy Media) is exactly what you need. It's quite short with about 1-hour length but will cover the most basics things about HTML like:

• Installing a Text Editor
• HTML Page Structure
• Syntax
• Headings, Paragraphs
• Lists, Tables, Forms, Buttons
• HTML5 Semantic Tags
• ...

Link to course

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Training

Because almost everything runs in the cloud today, the demand for cloud developers, administrators, and people with similar skills is continuously rising. And Amazon Web Services is a major, if not the biggest player in this game. If you have acquired one or more certifications for AWS services your chances for well-payed jobs are even higher.

And because of this, Andrew Brown, AWS Community Hero, and Cloud Expert created this course (and many more!) for you to prepare for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.

The free course covers topics like:

• Basic Cloud Concepts
• AWS Infrastructure
• Getting started with AWS
• EC2, ELB, S3, CloudFront
• Pricing Models & Pricing
• Security
• ...

This certificate is often seen as the entry-point for a career in cloud services and might be one of the biggest opportunities for you!

Link to course

Java Tutorial for Complete Beginners

When you are on Twitter or other social media covering programming topics it always seems that only JavaScript and maybe Python exist in this world. This, of course, is not true. Java is still a fantastic programming language that continuously becomes better and receives new features. It's strongly-typed and run by billions of devices, for example, Android phones or IoT devices. Major corporations have Java as part of their technology stack (a lot of AWS is written in Java!) and the demand and pay for qualified developers is still very high, just look at some job openings.

This course by John Purcell aims at anyone that has a desire to learn programming without any prior knowledge. It's a whopping 16-hours full of Java knowledge that covers topics such as:

• Core Java
• Variables
• Loops
• Arrays
• Methods
• Constructors
• Exceptions
• Classes
• Java Collections Framework
• ...

If you want to learn more about the difference between java and javascript check out this post.

Link to course

This is just a small sample of tons of fantastic courses available. But in the mass of content arises a problem: Where do you find the best courses for developers by the best developers?

There are many platforms like Youtube or Udemy where you can find courses. But some great courses are shared by their creators via social media or on their own, personal home pages solely. This makes it easy to miss out on their wonderful work!

I've therefore created a new feature for my site, The Smart Coder called DevCourses. It's a place where developers can discover the best courses for all kinds of topics like JavaScript, React, Vue, Java, AWS, and more! You can find all the courses listed above there plus more.

DevCourses is built for the community so any course creator can add their course to the site for others to discover it via a dedicated form. This way, the list of courses will steadily grow becoming the most comprehensive and high-quality repository for developer courses.

So if you are the creator of a course for developers, feel free to submit it to the site. And if you know about a good course that should be on the site, contact the creator to submit it.

This is a feature for the community that lives from the participation of the community.