9 Online Developer Academies for Regular & Consistent Learning

• On-demand learning to learn at our own pace
• Structured learning
• New topics introduced at regular intervals
• Learning from experts in the industry

Code.org

Code.org, I would say, is most interesting of them all due to some of the following reasons:

• The overall objective it is trying to achieve to spread greater awareness about computer programming in schools (upto K-12) by providing free courses that are very easy to learn due to the very visual aspects.
• Also acts as a one-stop place for students to check out interesting courses from different websites.

It offers free online courses that are categorized under following two sections:

• An hour of learning
• Beyond one hour of learning

I started with an hour of learning course and found it very interesting as it focuses on visual learning while starting to teach the programming fundamentals with the help of solving puzzles. Quite interesting, is n’t it? Take a look at the puzzle below which I worked upon in my first hour of learning. That was a fun-based learning where I was learning flow logic using my favorite game characters from a popular game, Angry bird.

If you & your kid 🙂 want to quickly get on board with computer programming, Code.org is the place to go.

Codecademy.com

Codecademy.com is another interesting portal which allows you to learn the programming language such as Javascript on the go without you having need to install and configure anything on your computer box. Following are some of the courses that you could take it online, on-demand:

• HTML/CSS
• Javascript
• PHP
• Pythons
• Ruby
• APIs (Interesting for API developers)

As you decide to start learning, you are presented with a screen on whose left-hand side are given instructions to execute on the command-prompt that is displayed in the remaining part of the screen. Thus, it takes away the issue of installing and configuring the programming languages (such as PHP, Pythons, Ruby) which acts as one of the biggest hurdles for the rookie developers. One of the most interesting course is around APIs. You could learn to integrate some of the popular APIs such as Youtube, Twitter etc.

Coursera.org

Coursera.org presents tutorials in a structured fashion in form of covering week-wise topics. On Coursera, you would find computer science topics presented by professors/lecturers from different universities primarily from US. Some of the interesting & popular computer science courses that you may plan to take on Coursera are following:

•  Scala Programming by Martin Odersky
• Courses on Algorithms

MIT Open Course Ware (OCW)

MIT opencourseware presents computer science courses at both under-graduate and post-graduate level. These are the courses that are taught within MIT. If you want to take on the distance learning courses at your own pace, this should be a good place to start. It presents all topics including following:

• Data structure & Algorithms
• Computer programming fundamentals
• Java programming 

Edx.org

Edx.org presents online courses from various different universities around the world. Choose the “Computer Science” from the courses drop-down on the homepage and you would be presented with different courses from different universities. Following are some of the courses I found interesting:

• Introduction to Computer Science from IIT Bombay, MIT etc
• Introduction to Linux from Linux foundation

Udacity.com

Udacity.com do provides free courseware but ask users to subscribe to get access to full course. So, if you have got some bucks to spend on your learning and you would be happy to do so, go ahead and try Udacity.com. Th einteresting aspect that I found in relation with Udacity.com is around expert faculty/trainer that they managed to get on board. That said, they are also charging for the full access to course. The subscription fees looked to be $150/month and you could take these courses online. Some of the following courses, I found interesting:

• Introduction to Hadoop & Map Reduce (from Cloudera experts)
• Intro to Data science etc
• Mobile web development (from guys working in Google)

Google Developer Academy

Google Developer Academy presents courses that are primarily targeted around their products. As like above mentioned portals such as coursera, they, however, have not structured these topics suited for methodical learning. However, it does serve the purpose of presenting some of the key topics with comprehensive detail suitable for developers’ learning. One of my favorite are pages on Android programming. Following is the list of topics on which detailed pages are provided:

• Android
• Maps
• Youtube
• TV
• Cloud

Microsoft Virtual Academy

Microsoft virtual academy presents courses on windows related topic and also web programming concepts such as HTML5, Javascript, CSS3 etc. Check the information on top 5 online courses from Microsoft Virtual Academy on this page.

Khanacademy.org

Khanacademy.org primarily presents courses on subjects such as Maths, Science etc targeting audience such as school students. That said, it also presents a computer programming course under the initiative,  “Hour an Code”, in partnership with code.org for helping millions of students learn concepts of computer science and computer programming. You could as well learn fundamentals of computer programming in this page.