The Best Programming Basics Course

1. Harvard's CS50 Course

Harvard University has a pretty cool course on programming basics — Computer Science 50 or just CS50. Actually, "pretty cool" doesn't do it justice – it’s the most popular programming course on the planet!

It's honestly one of the most famous, popular, and best beginner programming courses out there. Its creator, Professor David Malan, is recognized as one of the most renowned educators in this field. Every year, David Malan teaches this intro programming course for beginners. Videos of the course are uploaded to YouTube, and text materials and lectures are available on Harvard's official site.

This course is all about programming basics. Over 11 two-hour lectures, you'll explore different areas of programming: from web development and PHP to C++ and Python. It's more of a sneak peek. You’ll get a feel for whether programming is your thing before diving deep into learning it seriously.

Here at CodeGym, we think this course is super useful, so we recommend watching it for inspiration. Watch, learn, and enjoy!

2. CodeGym Community

If you haven’t joined our CodeGym Community yet, now’s the perfect time to do so. You’ll find friends, fun facts, and success stories from people who are close to completing the course. It's super important to learn from those ahead of you while they’re still around. Come join us!

3. Wrapping Up Level One

Congrats, you’ve completed your first level on CodeGym. Only one level down, and you’ve already picked up a ton of important and interesting stuff. Great job!

Today you learned:

• What variables are;
• How to print messages to the screen;
• How to work with expressions;
• How to write comments and why they’re needed;
• Gained some hands-on experience with the WebIDE.

Awesome! Of course, the next levels won't be as easy as this one, but the difficulty will grow gradually. Same goes for the complexity of the practice tasks.

Kind of like hitting the gym – slowly increasing the load, and a newbie is bench-pressing 100kg after six months to a year.

Boring lessons are so last century. Chalk on a blackboard... Seriously? That hasn’t changed since the 15th century. Back then, they probably still had dinosaurs roaming the streets.

You’re moving on to the next level! Only 58 to go. Then it’s job-hunting time! ;)