#412 overall
Learn to Code (HTML/CSS, Ruby)
Codecademy
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2014 · score 1.0
Codecademy's free introductory course teaching the basics of HTML/CSS and Ruby through interactive exercises in the browser. Commenters describe it as a starting point for people with no prior programming experience.
Commenters call it a great intro for people who want to get started, and one says it is where to begin with coding.
Recommendations by year
20062026
Wasnt on HN this weekend. I started really simple with HTML/CSS. Then I moved on to Ruby, and then learned the Ruby on Rails framework. Now I write apps that analyze web data.
Start with CodeCademy.com. It's a great intro for people who want to get started. There are also classes on Udacity you can check out. Feel free to email me if you want to connect further. My contact info is on my profile.
I saw my first Unix prompt two years ago, nested inside of this editor called "Emacs." In my 23 years I had only programmed conditionals in Excel, and now I was responsible for using this system to maintain some of the most important econometric models in the world.
Fast forward to present day, where I'm writing linear classifiers in a Lisp dialect I had never seen before this weekend. I've previously built scrapers in Python, a website with Django, side projects with a bunch of technologies (R, JS, SQL, Redis, MongoDB, etc. etc.). I enjoyed working on all of these enough to start a graduate program in CS.
People start writing, running, painting, and working on other awesome trades at all ages. Coding shouldn't be any different. Click on pg's link to Codecademy, go check out MIT's introductory CS courses on OpenCourseware, and don't worry about how old you are!