1.5.1. Codecademy

Codecademy is an online service that teaches users new programming languages, APIs, and basic web development skills. Languages it currently supports include HTML/CSS, JavaScript/jQuery, PHP, Python, and Ruby, with support for many APIs such as YouTube, GitHub, and Twitter. Through its interactive console and progress tracking, Codecademy provides examples and short exercises that constructively help you learn.

Each language has its own course track for users to follow where each step of the track is a new exercise. One of the great things about Codecademy is that instead of providing only examples for users to look at, each step requires the user to enter code themselves, which will be checked and verified by the automatic checker. Overall, Codecademy is a lot of people's first stop when trying to learn how to code or even just to pick up a new language.

Good Features:

• Interactive coding environment that runs your code and displays the result
• Offers constructive suggestions for how you can fix broken code during any given exercise
• Progress tracker shows you how far along the entire course you are
• Provides a forum where users can ask and answer questions about problems with the exercises

Bad Features:

• Mostly only support for web development based languages
• Automated checker isn't very flexible to creative answers on problems
• Course subsection titles aren't very descriptive for the topics being taught in that lesson

Missing Features:

• No ability to assess a person's skill level and suggest a possible starting place in the course track