Courses
The most obvious one: Free and paid online courses. Many course providers have at least one course program for absolute beginners to get started, which usually cost from a few dollars, up to $1000s of dollars. Our favourite ones are:
- Intro to Programming from Udacity
- Programming Fundamentals by Coursera & Duke University
- Introduction to Programming on Udemy
The work is still on you - but some of these courses offer great benefits, like a big community and human graded assignments that will help you a lot.
Usually with these you get what you pay for - so some of these are just a collection of videos, while others offer in-person lectures, projects, mentors and similar.
University
The second most obvious one is to take university classes. If you are not at an age anymore where you are thinking about going to university - many universities do offer free recordings of courses on their sites!
In many cases there are also course notes on GitHub and similar which you can use. This definitely counts under teaching yourself - but the resources out there make it possible.
The best thing? This method is completely free, but it will also take you a while to find a solution to difficult problems.
Personal Mentor
The path in between? A personal mentor could be a good option for you. A skill mentor would not only be able to help you navigate all these free resources, but also help you once you get stuck.
Finding a mentor can be hard, so it’s a good thing that there are platforms like MentorCruise who make it easy.
On MentorCruise, programming beginners should have no problem finding a mentor, who not only cares about their learnings, but can also help them find a career. If you have no idea what to look for, try the following ones:
- Coding Mentors
- Python Mentors (a really popular scripting language)
- JavaScript Mentors (the go-to language in web development)
- Android Mentors
Good luck!