Stop worrying and start coding: sites to get started

Bengaluru: The chief executive officer of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, received no formal computer science education, and is a self-taught coder, who worked as a marketer by day.

Instagram, one of the most popular social networks today, was bought by Facebook for $1 billion.

Thanks to the enormous number of online courses which teach programming today, anyone can be the next Systrom, gaining the right computer skills to execute the next big idea.

As more traditional businesses transform to become technology-led businesses, coding is set to become as important a skill as reading or writing.

First steps

Programming needn’t always be reams of boring text. You can get started with visual programming languages that abstract the text, and let you explore the fundamentals using visual elements like blocks. A popular example is Scratch, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help kids to get started with computer programming.

Code.org, a US-based non-profit, backed by companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. and individuals including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is another site that can be used to explore programming (by anyone aged six and above) using popular games as storyboards.

As a bonus, most of the videos on Code.org are subtitled in Hindi. (Another programming tutorial in Hindi can be found here)

Learning interactively

It helps immensely when you get instant feedback on where your code is wrong, and to see what you’ve created. Sites such as Codecademy, Khanacademy and Code School let you worry only about the code you are writing and have a browser-based platform that guides you.

The languages that can be learnt here include HTML, CSS, Javascript and SQL.

Open online courses

Massive open online courses (MOOCs), made popular by platforms such as Coursera, edX and lynda.com, are also a good way to learn programming, although they tend to be concept heavy. The first MOOCs that gained momentum were those that taught some programming. On these platforms, learners at various levels—beginner or intermediate—can take courses from the best universities in the world.

For jobs

Some sites have a job-oriented approach to teach people programming, and focus on the skills and languages that are in demand in the tech industry.

Udacity, for instance, has courses or ‘nanodegrees’ that have been created in partnership with tech companies such as Google, AT&T, Facebook, Salesforce and Cloudera. Recently, Indian e-commerce firm Flipkart hired three people without interviewing them, only based on their Udacity profiles.

Udacity, however, costs $199 a month, and users are required to enrol for a minimum of two months before they obtain a nanodegree.

Coding competitions on sites such as Hackerearth and HackerRank are also a way for those with some prowess, to not only improve their skills, but also be scouted by top companies sourcing talent on these platforms.