Top 15 Websites To Improve Your Coding Skills

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Analytics Vidhya

5 min readSep 10, 2020

These days, it is assumed for everyone to have a reasonable understanding of fundamental programming concepts and a grasp of at least one ‘trendy’ language (e.g. Python, R, Javascript, SQL, Swift) irrespective of the industry. Have a coding ‘edge’ if you work in trading, finance, automotive, healthcare or marketing definitely gives you some bonus points and might even make you the go-to person.

There are a myriad of popular websites that help you build a foundation and provide exposure to a range of languages/problems but these are my personal favourites:

1. Codecademy [FREEMIUM]

~45 million learners
Languages: HTML/CSS, Python, Javascript, Java, SQL, Bash/Shell, Ruby, C++, R, C#, PHP, Go, Swift, Kotlin

✔ Beautiful IDE

✔ Great range of languages

✔ Real world projects

✔ Paid Certification

✘ Pro membership can get quite expensive (£32/month or £192/year)

2. Coursera [FREE]

~30 million learners
Languages: All

✔ Accredited by the leading global universities

✔ Paid certification (recognised by employers)

✔ Completely free apart from graded assignments and course certificates

✘ No IDE provided

3. Udemy [PAID]

~10 million learners
Languages: All

✔ Fantastic courses by experts

✔ Regular discounts so quite affordable

✔ Rating system allows you to find the ‘best’ courses

✘ No IDE provided

✘ Quality of courses can vary quite considerably

4. YouTube [FREE]

~2 billion users
Languages: All

✔ A massive library of videos

✘ No IDE provided

✘ Quality of courses can vary quite considerably

5. Hackerrank [FREE]

~11 million developers
Languages: C, Clojure, C++, C#, Erlang, Haskell, Java, Javascript, Lua, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, Swift

✔ Beautiful IDE

✘ Not a whole load of theory — just a huge collection of exercises

6. CodeChef [FREE]

~ 1 million developers
Languages: All

✔ Instant IDE

✘ Not much learning content

✘ Not the best UI

7. Leetcode [FREEMIUM]

~1 million developers
Languages: All

✔ Functional and aesthetic UI

✔ Excellent prep (in terms of difficulty) for software development interviews/roles

✘ Premium subscription can be a tad expensive ($35/month or $159/year)

8. Coderbyte [FREEMIUM]

~200k developers
Languages: All

✔ Lovely and productive UI

✔ Excellent prep (in terms of difficulty) for software development interviews/roles

✘ Premium subscription can be a tad expensive ($29/14 days, $79/90 days, $35/month or $150/year)

9. Khan Academy [FREE]

~100 million users
Languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript

✔ Great quality content

✔ Mixture of videos and challenges

✔ Amazing ‘video editor’ where code is being typed by the instructor but you can pause the video and play around with the code in that current state

✘ Limited number of languages

10. Upskill [FREEMIUM]

~70k developers
Languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript

✔ Very informative videos

✔ A lot of free content

✘ Not a lot of practical challenges/problems

✘ No IDE provided

✘ Limited number of languages

11. W3Schools [FREE]

Probably 100 million+ developers (literally everyone has used this website at some point)
Languages: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Javascript, Ajax, Python, Java, C++, C#, SQL, PHP, ASP, Raspberry Pi, XML

✔ Deceptively simple website with clearly laid out theory

✔ Simply and useful IDE

✔ Plenty of exercises and quizzes

✔ Paid certification

✘ Doesn’t have the ‘course-like’ feel to it with structured videos and assignments etc.