Oh man! I was cruising along this vast system of tubes looking for startups while creating the ‘Top 10 Web Startups to Watch in 2012′ for Top 10 Tuesday, and I ran across this neat little web startup called Codecademy. Codecademy looks to expose new users who would otherwise not have a fun way to learn about programming. They take a very interesting approach to teaching someone to program that even had me, an experience coder, hooked in no time. Codecademy uses achievements like the ones you would get in an Xbox 360 game to reward you for simple tasks that eventually teach you how to program a variety of things. There are three paths that you can choose to embark upon your programming quest:

I decided to go ahead and start the first one, and finish them in order. The easiest one, I believe, would be the middle one, as it is more web-programming oriented. I always found markup languages to be the easiest to learn because they have a very simple structure that is almost reminiscent of the early days on qbasic, for me.
Javascript, in my eyes, is an important language to learn for a beginner along with Python because they are both quick and scrappy languages that you can hack together to do all kinds of things. The concepts that you learn in Javascript apply to many other programming languages, and will end up in the end making your programming life much easier, and helps make long streams of code feel more like organized sets of tools rather than clutters blobs of text.

It looks like Codecademy is too good of an opportunity to pass up, so I would like to go ahead and document my progress as I go through the different levels for this week’s, and the first-ever “Project Weekend” in our new thematic week. What do you guys think? Would anybody like to participate with me? I’ll be doing it regardless, but if you would like, I would love to feature you guy’s achievements as well!

Check Out Part 2!

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