Pros & Cons
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- Free
- Thousands of hours of coding lessons
- Integrates with GitHub
- Robust alumni network
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- Some online communities are more overwhelming than helpful
- No longer focused on nonprofit outreach
Free Code Camp Specs
| Built-in Tools | |
| Free Courses | |
| Free Trial | |
| Quizzes | |
| Starting Price | Free |
| User Forums | |
| Video Tutorials |
For many people, learning to code is an invaluable skill that keeps them competitive in the modern, tech-driven job market—and many options exist for picking up the necessary knowledge. To make its service stand out from a crowded pack, the nonprofit Free Code Camp provides thousands of hours of coding lessons and connects you to a robust alumni network to help you put those newfound abilities to work. Free Code Camp is an excellent resource for students, but Codecademy remains our Editors' Choice winner thanks to similarly high-quality, no-cost online coding classes along with the option to upgrade to top-tier premium material.
Getting Started With Free Code Camp
Free Code Camp has more than 3,000 hours' worth of coding practice for students to complete. That's an appropriately daunting number for a subject as complicated as coding, but each lesson is a digestible 10-minute to three-hour chunk.
The lessons include introductory CSS and HTML5 courses, responsive web design, JavaScript algorithms and data structures, AI chatbots, and front-end development libraries. And it's all free of charge! Treehouse, our Editors' Choice winner for paid coding classes, charges monthly fees for its full library ($25 per month). Even Codecademy has a handful of premium options, starting at $15 per month. Notably, Codecademy's paid material is better than what you'll find on Free Code Camp, so having that option is nice.
(Credit: Free Code Camp/PCMag)Each topic contains dozens of individual lessons, so you'll have a firm grasp of the material before moving on to something new. If you find the default lesson order too repetitive, you can skip to another at any time. You can also stop and later resume any lesson. Free Code Camp's course depth and variety are remarkable for a free program; it's closer to that of a paid service like LinkedIn Learning.
The lessons take place in a clean and easily understandable text editor. On mobile, you can download a recommended third-party keyboard with coding shortcuts. As you type, you can watch the real-time coding results in a mock web browser on the right side of the screen. Quiz-style objectives appear to help you learn, and they get checked off as you run functional code.
If you get stuck, you can ask for a hint or pull up a useful video tutorial. If these lessons aren't enough, check out the more than 10,000 noninteractive tutorials, guides, and blog posts written by various contributors. Popular tutorials include "Auto-Numbering in Excel" and "Best Instagram Post Time." In a nice touch, Free Code Camp has a cool, 24/7 radio station that plays chill beats as you code. The service also has an educational podcast hosted by the site's founder, Quincy Larson.
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(Credit: Free Code Camp/PCMag)The Coding Community
Free Code Camp's educational offering is expansive but ultimately finite. When coding in the real world, you're bound to encounter problems that can't be solved by what you've learned in school alone. Fortunately, Free Code Camp hosts a community with thousands of users.
You can interact with the Free Code Camp community in several ways. For example, you can create a GitHub account (which aspiring coders should have anyway, considering how often the service is used for collaborating on code) and join the Free Code Camp open-source repository. That's the best place to report bugs. You can also access the Discord-powered private chat server. Both are appreciated options, but they're potentially overwhelming. You already need at least some basic coding knowledge to make sense of GitHub, and conversations fly by so fast in the chat that you can easily get lost. The easiest and fastest way to find a community answer to your question, though, is by searching for it in the user forums.
(Credit: Free Code Camp/PCMag)Free Code Camp's coolest and arguably most-useful feature is how it directs you toward its alum network, where you can start your coding career. Although it's no substitute for college, Free Code Camp says more than 100,000 graduates have gotten jobs at companies like Apple, Google, and Spotify. Other courses may have realistic challenge prompts or teardowns of actual websites, but you can't beat real-world experience.
First, you must earn a certification proving you've completed a substantial amount of coding practice. After all, it would be uncool to saddle an organization with coders who have no idea what they're doing. Once you're qualified, though, you can start making connections in the LinkedIn group.
(Credit: Free Code Camp/PCMag)Previously, Free Code Camp funneled graduates toward nonprofit organizations like itself, including various charities; you can donate or buy merchandise from the gift shop. However, the curriculum now focuses on broader coding education, and it treats coding for nonprofits as separate, optional topics. The alum network might help get you a job at a nonprofit, but the charity angle is deemphasized. Real-world meetups aren't as common as they used to be, either.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Free Code Camp)
Free Code Camp
The no-cost Free Code Camp is an online learning tool that provides many coding lessons plus valuable connections that help you apply what you've learned in the job market.