I posted the story on Facebook the other day. I was talking to my friend from college a week or so ago, and he got me hooked on this webpage called Codecademy, that he's used in his web programming class. I gave it a try and when I saw the different scripting languages that were supported, I became hooked.
I've been using Ruby to work on Selatria for the longest while, and I was happy to see a web track for that.
The website gives little nifty achievements (called badges) on your profile if you make enough progress in their tutorial courses (called tracks), and it's a great positive reinforcement to keep going and working towards completing the track. There are also bonus achievements for working on activities on consecutive days (building a streak).
Here is a list of the possible tracks (if you decide to take any of them, I would highly recommend signing up first so it records progress immediately):
Although this website won't teach you high-level languages like C/C++/Java/etc or the more concepts behind them (pointers/linked lists/vectors/Big-O notation, etc...) but I think Codecademy provides a great foundation to branch into them later.
Personally, I wish I had a better understanding of the syntax in the transition from the initial 100-level Visual Basic course to the more advanced 200+ level programming courses I took in college. (I initially struggled with the concepts of loops/object-oriented programming early on.) -- I wish this site was around back then to learn these scripting languages before going straight into a high-level one.
I would suggest this site to any programmer who would also like to branch into C++/Java. Python and JavaScript are two scripting languages that would be nice to learn beforehand.
Hmm, anyway. I have my Codecademy profile here. (It's also on the top of the blog too. I'm in this for the long haul.) I would like to see yours as well! :) Feel free to let me know your username if you decide to take it up. Would love to have discussions on it. My goal is to stay 100% on tracks in order to keep the knowledge fresh in my head.
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