A great start to teaching programming, but will require your guidance for best effect.

The site is organized well and covers a lot of specific topics. They offer many learning tools like articles, cheatsheets, and videos. The articles are simple and to the point and offer hyperlinks to explain various concepts covered like methods and data structures. I could see myself using this as a reference for my CS classes to break down concepts. I like that the courses are self-paced and interactive, allowing you to practice code related to a new topic. This site caters towards older students as well. They offer code challenges for technical interview preparation and Q&A’s for career advice.

I think Codecademy is a great resource for learning different coding languages for free or for a small price. They provide many videos and lessons that help students understand concepts about coding, making learning more interesting. Overall, I recommend this product as it is a great way of learning code!

Codecademy recently switched to the unfortunate business tactic of having brand new users enter their credit card info before even getting to TRY the pro courses, aka the courses that would actually help them and near what is being taught in classrooms. Basically, that way they bag a few extra dollars from anyone who tries the class, would otherwise decide against purchasing their service and forgets to go through the process to un-enroll. Furthermore, they “recommend” and by default select you on the pay for one year option, and offer no refunds. So imagine on day 8 you get charged hundreds of dollars for a site you are just trying out? These extra dollars from those who would otherwise not continue are the reason for this despicable business decision. Those interested will still buy pro, which I have always recommended in the past, and the freeloaders will just cancel same as they did before. This goes to show you how codecademy has changed over the years, putting more and more in the paid Pro section, even some just basic programming languages now, and now this. I teach an entry level data science course and used to recommend codeacademy to all my students, many of which I’m sure went on to pay for excellent content that exists on this site. However, I can’t justify even one of my students coming up to me asking why they lost out on hundreds of dollars and can’t get a refund. These are busy students! And sometimes they don’t listen so well. However, this blatantly greedy business practice will lead myself and other teachers to steer people away from codeacademy on this and other forums.