This is not the usual clickbait blog post such as “An awesome list of 10 Best/Must Have/World Class Free Web Development Courses Bla Bla Bla” BS list. This is my own personal, comprehensive, well-kept, high-quality list of free web development courses and other resources.
You can find lots of free learning resources on the web. But as mentioned before, there is a lot of low-quality, clickbait content. This made me wonder “Can you really learn the skills needed to be a web developer for free?” The answer is – you can! You just need to navigate your way through the bullshit, to the really good quality stuff out there.
In this list, I made an effort to bring you that very stuff. High-quality, educational resources about web development. This List is:
- Comprehensive – As part of my never-ending quest for high-quality sources, I review and check tens of sites per week. You can find here free resources on just about any subject relevant to web development
- Well-kept – I keep this list updated and relevant.
- High-quality – I review all listing personally. Only high-quality, free resources are listed. No commercial filed bullshit website. I only list it here actual courses – i.e content that covers a subject from start to finish (not tutorials series or even very comprehensive articles on a specific subject).
BTW, I have a list of awesome development tools and resources – most are free.
Free Web Development Courses
This list contains video courses and other forms of courses such as interactive learning sites or plain old text-based. Some require to signup, but all are absolutely free. Obviously, most of the free stuff is either introductory level or shorter than the paid courses. It’s all a matter of picking and choosing the ones that best suit your goals.
Online Learning Platforms
Scrimba is a very nice interactive code-learning platform that offers some decent and comprehensive free web development courses for beginners and advanced programmers.
Udemy, the online learning platform, has some real treasures of free learning. All you’ve to go to do is to apply some filters to discover them.
Udacity.com is another specialized online learning platform that offers some great courses for free.
Datacamp is an excellent online learning platform dedicated to learning data science and related skills. You can find free SQL, Python, and even Machine Learning and some others for free.
Freecodecamp.org – as the name implies has a plethora of really in-depth high-level courses from back to front ends – including interviews prep, QA, Data Science, and other great stuff. The interface is a bit old-school and text-based – but the content is great.
If you are a child of the 80′ – you might have noticed the 3 Amigos reference. If not – here is a funny gif 🙂
Codesmith is a coding school in NY. They have an excellent online video course about all things JavaScript that goes from beginner to advanced topics.
Structured learning paths by web.dev (currently covers CSS, PWA, HTML FORMS). Text-based learning courses about web fundamentals. web.dev is a google developers project.
Hyperskill a JetBrains project offers a free Frontend Developer course + a free Kotlin Basics course.
Futurecoder.io is an interactive Python tutorial that gets you from a beginner to an advanced python programmer.
School of Kubernetes by Infracloud provide free Kubernetes training.
Wesbos, a well-known figure in the development education community offer several free, very good courses on CSS and JS.
- flexbox.io – A simple, free 20-video course that will help you master CSS Flexbox!
- cssgrid.io – A video course on CSS Grid.
- javascript30.com – 30 vanilla js coding challenges.
- commandlinepoweruser.com – A video series for web developers on learning a modern command-line workflow with ZSH, Z, and related tools.
- masteringmarkdown.com – A quick 34-minute mini-course for anyone who is looking to learn markdown for the first time,
Full Stack open 2022 is an online course where you can learn Learn the full range of the most updated web technologies from back to front – React, Redux, Node.js, MongoDB, GraphQL and TypeScript in one go! The course is brought to you by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki.
General Programming Skills
Basecodefieldguide.com teaches writing code that is less complex and more readable. The author – Jason McCreary also created gettinggit.com – which as the name implies is about…Git. Jason also holds online workshops – some for free at workshopsbyjmac.com
Refactoring.guru is an excellent source of knowledge about advanced concepts such as refactoring, design patterns, SOLID principles, and other smart programming topics
LeetCode.com an online programmer training and interviews prep company has many free learning resources on traditional computer science topics.
Free Web Development Books
Frontend
A fully online, comprehensive book on Javascript eloquentjavascript.net
Newline Has a nice and useful list of free books such as “30 Days of React”, “30 Days of Vue”, “30 Days of React Native” and some other free titles.
Packet – a big tech publisher that provides some high-quality free titles (free signup needed).
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer has a free-to-read-online list of very in-depth books on JavaScript ins his exploringjs.com. You can buy them if you like, but they are also available to read online. They include “JavaScript for impatient programmers” – for newcomers, “Deep JavaScript: Theory and techniques” for more advanced programmers, and “Tackling TypeScript: Upgrading from JavaScript” and as it states – it is meant to complement the official TypeScript handbook.
The Greatest CSS Tricks Vol. I. A compendium (it’s a word – look it up) of CSS tricks with an explanation for the intermediate CSS Developer.
Backend and Server Technologies
Dayle Rees writes great books, mainly about PHP and Laravel such as PHP Pandas.
Dataschool.com is a community-driven school of free webbooks and content. You can find there a complete SQL from the ground up book + other goodies
Miscellaneous Topics
Manning Publishing, a well-known publisher of tech and CS-related books has a big and very diverse collection of free books about various aspects of programming.
This one is almost mythical. A detailed and comprehensive book about understanding and using REST. A must for every beginner – An introduction to APIs.
Patterns.dev is a free book on design patterns for building advanced web applications with vanilla JavaScript and React. You can get the pdf/ePub for free, or if you choose to – pay the authors for it.
Flavio Copes is a web developer and blogger. His blog is an excellent source of information about web development and programming in general. He has written several books about programming, e.g. “The React Beginner’s Handbook”, “The JavaScript Beginner’s Handbook”, “The HTML Handbook”…you got the point. You can find them all here. I would also recommend subscribing to his list (he really does produce awesome content).
Promises – you can’t do without them, but you can’t call them back… JS Promises are a fundamental topic for any would-be frontend (end backend) developer. This is an in-depth book on the topic.
Kinsta has an online academy with some great free content (videos and books) at their Kinsta Acadamy
Other Free Web Development Resources
Youtube Videos
You can find some real Jams on youtube – full courses that take you from newbie to expert/advanced on some topics.
Brad Traversy Has some excellent crash courses – quick and focused introductions to several important technologies and frameworks – e.g. React JS Crash Course, Vue JS Crash Course, Node.js Crash Course, TypeScript Crash Course. You can find them and more in his youtube channel
interactive courses
Interactive courses are a personal favorite of mine. It is a great way to learn new topics.
Sqlbolt.com – an oldy but goodie SQL interactive tutorial.
learngitbranching.js.org – I wish I knew this one when I was starting git.
Regex..you gotta love/hate it (I haven’t decided yet). At regexlearn.com you can learn Regex from [a-z].
Designpatternsgame.com -Gamify your design patterns learning path.
Messwithdns.net – Understanding DNS is an important skill for any web developer. But it is often overlooked, and poorly understood. This one comes to remedy this.
Infinum.com has a list of useful handbooks about various topics such as the Frontend Handbook, WordPress Handbook, Flutter Handbook, and more topics.
rtcamp.com – a WordPress agency that offers a free WordPress development course on their website.
Hope you enjoyed this list. If you have any other resources you would like to share – ping me. If you found any errors or bad links – I would also like to hear.