I'd Like To Thank The Hackademy

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My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012! Join me

This testimony via tweet was just one of hundreds of thousands of people who made their 2012 New Year's Resolution to learn how to write code. This one person, however, just so happens to be be NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and his pledge helped to inspire many others to do the same.

In just the first 48 hours of 2012, over 97,000 people signed up for Codecademy.com's year long introductory track for teaching the basics of programming in Javascript and HTML/CSS. As of the time of this post, Codeyear.com reports over 438,416 people have enrolled to receive the weekly interactive programming lessons.

Codecademy even captured the imagination of the highest office in the U.S. who announced a condensed version of Code Year called Code Summer+. As an extension of Summer Jobs+, Code Summer+ will offer volunteer organized meetup groups all over the country, who will meet face-to-face and discuss the programming lessons.

People often approach me on and off of campus and ask "Where should I start?" Codecademy is one of the places I usually point folks to, but it is by no means the only place to learn. One of the best resources available online for learning about web programming is by far and away W3Schools.com. Their interactive Try-it-yourself editor is a fantastic way to start coding immediately, and to even experiment with other pieces of code you find elsewhere on the internet.

For other beginner friendly approaches to learning languages outside of Javascript, HTML, and CSS, I usually point people to many of the books listed on Learncodethehardway.org. Zed Shaw has compiled a number of very useful guides, which are happily absent of his disdain for traditional education and software production paradigms (NSFW) for the easily offended.

Take note #why_college'ers, the folks taking the pledge did not mention anything about going to school to learn how to program in 2012...