Sarah ChimaLet us play a game. It is called 'My favourite learning resources'. Here is how it is played: We share learning resources we love as developers or has helped us learn a particular language or framework or technology. We are not doing this just for fun. We are doing this to help us find useful resources that can help us in our career as developers. At this point, I will share a personal experience.
Last year, when I was learning how to React (lol, I was learning React), I didn't know how useful and understandable their official documentation was. It was a developer advocate I met in a Facebook event that encouraged me to check it and it really went a long way in helping to learn React. Tada, the end. Lesson? Share your resources with people because it might go a long way toward helping them. Back to our game.
I know you are excited to share yours but I will go first. In no particular order, here are some of my favourite learning resources:
Disclaimer: This is in no way pitching one resource over another. Different resources work for different people. This is just to help people know available resources that have helped others and they can learn from.
This is where I started learning how to code. This is where I still go to learn new tools or technologies. It is one of the best learning resources for coding and the best part is that it is totally free. Recently, their curriculum was updated to include 6 certifications which include Responsive web design, data visualization, and API and microservices certification.
Why I love FreeCodeCamp is that I get to practice what I learn immediately and there are lots of projects you can work on to apply the knowledge you have gotten.
Udacity is well known for its Nanodegrees but do you know that there are lots of free courses you can take on Udacity as a developer. For example, this link provides a list of courses you can take to ace your skills as a web developer.
Udacity is also great because of its excellent teachers and practical examples. Also, there are practice projects you can do while you are learning.
Codecademy is another popular online resource you can take free coding lessons on. I think it's great for getting started as a beginner. When I was taking lessons in React, before I was introduced to reactjs.org, I found Codecademy very useful because I was able to practice what I learn immediately.
This is a catalogue of the courses they offer.
Mozilla Developers Network(MDN)
The MDN web docs is an excellent resource for web developers. It gives an in-depth explanation of almost all concepts in JavaScript(including ES6) CSS and HTML. It a well-trusted source of knowledge. It also has a collection of articles curated to help beginners get into web development. MDN is super helpful if you want to fully understand any topic and their browser compatibility.
Official Documentation
Shout out to all who write good documentation for their framework, library or tool. What's better than learning from the creators themselves. Previously, I used to think that official docs are not as helpful as tutorials written by others but that has changed. Many docs explain the concepts much more than any other tutorial will. Some even go as far as adding practical examples that you can follow along with. Some examples of good docs I have come across are Reactjs.org, Vuejs.org, Nextjs.org. There are a lot out there and you can learn a lot from them. When learning a new concept, be sure to check out the official docs for it, it might be all you need.
I can go on and on discussing great learning resources I know(like dev.to, I guess you already know this) but I want to hear from you. So what are your favourite learning resources?
