Hi everyone!

Have you ever thought of what are various resources for learning programming?

If your answer is yes than this post may help you find resources that most fit you. They may help you get an experience for career or hobby in programming.

As a person who is in the middle of getting programming experience I looked for and found a number of most useful resources for my opinion.

It is possible to differentiate those resources according to price, depth of material and its level etc.

At first I want to describe them in a general way and then I`ll provide a table that will summarize those descriptions.

One of the important criteria that is taken into consideration is certainly a price of learning. There are a number of possibilities to learn courses on programming for free.

1. Udacity is one the interesting sources for learning programming. All of the courses there are for free. All of them are taught by people form academia. Courses rated according to learner previous experience such as beginner, intermediate and advance. Most of them use a web enabled Python language as a basic mean of implementing programming exercises.

One of the key features of Udacity courses is that they are highly interactive with lots of quizzes and every course has a number of programming assignments for each lesson.

In addition to free courses Udacity now provides an opportunity to learn a number of them for a fee with dedicated coach that may help to achieve better results and this path has formal certificate that is given after successful project completion.

Brief summary for Udacity:

• free and not so,
• certification courses for a fee,
• detailed academic level courses,
• highly interactive,
• transcription for various languages,

2. Next one is Khan Academy. This resource has courses both on computer programming and computer sciences for free. Those courses consists of video material with no assignments or quizzes but with interactive web enabled Python programs for hands on experience. It is unknown to me if they are taught by people with academic background.

Brief summary for Khan Academy:

• free video materials,
• no assignments,
• interactive web enabled Python working programs,
• transcription for various languages

3. Coursera  is in some way as Udacity but different. Most of the courses there are free but there is a possibility to get a certificate of completion for fee. It has for my opinion the highest academic level out of resources described earlier. It have learning tracks with built-in courses according to syllabus. It has quizzes and assignments. But less interactive than Udacity courses are. Courses are taught in various languages.

Brief summary for Coursera:

• free courses and not so,
• certification courses for a fee,
• highest academic level courses,
• courses are taught in various languages

4. Udemy also has free courses and ones for a fee. Some of them taught by academics and some not. Courses for a fee consist of video material for a lifetime usage. It also has a certification track for a fee.

Brief summary for Coursera:

• free courses and not so,
• certification courses for a fee,
• lifetime usage of material for a fee course

5. Pluralsight is not free at all but has a wealth of programming courses that taught by developers. It has monthly or annual subscription. There are two types of fees. “Basic” and “advanced” one. For the basic you`ll get video materials for the period of subscription and for the advanced one you`ll be able to get code snippets, presentation and certificate. It is possible to view videos also on mobile. There are no assignments or quizzes whatsoever.

Brief summary for Pluralsight:

• courses for a fee taught by developers,
• monthly or annual subscription,
• certification for “advanced” fee,
• no assignments or quizzes

So for the summary of this all here comes a table

Resource	Basic content for free (Yes/ No)	Advanced content for a fee (Yes/ No)	Taught by (academia/ developers/ other	Interactive(Yes/ No)	Localization(Transcription/ Language support)
Udacity	Yes	Yes, coach, certification	Academia	Yes, highly	English, Transcription for a number of languages
Khan Academy	Yes	No	Other	Partially	Transcription for various languages
Coursera	Yes	Yes, certification	Academia	Partially	Taught in various languages
Udemy	Yes	Yes, certification	Other	No	English
Pluralsight	No	Yes, certification	Developers	No	English

That`s it for today.

See you.

Welcome back.

In  this post I want to share with you ideas of making a contribution.

By contribution I mean making a change that will help others and by the way may help you.

Has it happened to you to spot some obvious or not spelling, content issue in your favorite book, e-book, blog etc?

Just like this one The C++ Programming Language. Or maybe you felt the urge to mail an author of the book asking for advise? If so know that this more than possible and interesting thing to do.

I`ve found out that authors for most part are kind persons that are willing to answer your mail and even help you.

It turns out the best way to make a contribution is to propose an author a help in ‘bug reporting’ or ‘debugging’ if you will especially when this help is for free from your side.

OK. You`ve got that book you want to contribute to. Here are the steps that may help you to get to know the author, to make your contribution and even to find a friend.

1. Write the author and ask if there is any need for help. By the way it is better to deal with private authors I`ve found they are happy to get any help. But if you got courage and want to deal with publisher you can make use of errata pages just like this one Errata

2. If you got green light don’t hesitate and use this table that in a QA way will help you to distill what you want to suggest in a logical way.

Page or Link to source of issue	Actual content/ code etc.	Expected/ proposed content, code etc.	Comments
	For axample	For example	Spelling
	.		And
	.		So on

Accumulate this data at your favorite source such as Dropbox, Google Drive, One Note etc. and give it to the author for the review.

That`s it. It`s simple as that. And as one person said there is a need to be consistent and to get with this activity to the finish line or end of the book.

By the way if you want to make you own e-book for free and edit your own materials than use this free service that you may find useful Ourboox.

Till next time.