It’s a great time to be a programmer right now, for many reasons — one of which is the wide variety of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that are available that allow developers to build applications with sophisticated features more quickly and easily than ever.
Learn free programming skills at home
Codecademy launched last year with the mission of making it possible for absolutely anyone to learn to program. What makes it stand out from many other online programming tutorials in that students can complete all the lessons within their web browsers. There is no need to download or install any programming languages or development software.
Codecademy, the startup that aims to teach people everywhere how to code, wants to help make those APIs even more accessible. Today Codecademy is announcing that it has partnered with a number of established web companies to offer a host of new lessons that concentrate on the basics of building with their specific APIs.
New York University teamed up with Codecademy
New York University teamed up with the computer programming tutorial site Codecademy to offer a free, non-credit programming class for NYU students. The pilot program ran from Sept. 28 through Dec. 7, 2012.
Codecademy seeked to democratize computer programming by offering lessons via the web, and this NYU partnership had put a new spin on that mission — and added some legitimacy. According to Codecademy CEO Zach Sims, NYU had basically built a course around the existing Codecademy curriculum. “We’ve helped by recommending pieces of the curriculum and giving suggestions on how to run the program,” Sims said. In addition to Codecademy’s interactive lessons, the course included monthly guest speakers.
NYU has a history of offering creative ways to introduce coding to its students. For example, Adam Parrish teaches a course called “Reading and Writing Electronic Text” as part of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The course uses Python programming techniques to teach experimental creative writing. Students learn to use the language’s text processing features to manipulate or generate or rearrange text to create new works. For example, students could create an digital version of the Burroughs and Gysin cut-up technique.
Codecademy has widely expanded
In January 2012, the company launched its CodeYear campaign to get people to pledge to learn to program. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg famously made the pledge. Meanwhile, Codecademy’s curriculum is being used by companies to teach non-technical staff to code, and is starting to see some success.
Codecademy is starting to expand its scope as well. It started out teaching JavaScript, HTML and CSS, but in July the company added tutorials for the programming language Python. It also recently and also published a curriculum for those wishing to run after school programs for teaching code.
Launched API Lessions
Codecademy first launched API lessons last month, but this release brings a number of new big name API providers to the mix. Codecademy now has lessons for building with APIs from Twitter,Evernote, Box, and Gilt. The full list of Codecademy’s new API partners is rounded out by WePay, Microsoft SkyDrive, 23andme, Mashape, Ordr.in, Firebase, Easypost, Github, MailChimp, and Dwolla.
What can be done with these types of APIs is significant, Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims said. “Within a few minutes of starting lessons on Codecademy, users can do a few really awesome things,” he says. The Twitter API lesson teaches users how to read twitter from the code editor and create their own tweets, while the WePay and Dwolla APIs let users send money from the code editor and create invoices, for just a couple examples.
It’s a nice update from Codecademy, which has steadily iterated on its platform since its August 2011 launch and now has 17 staffers and $12.5 million in VC funding. Updates such as these makes the Codecademy platform a more robust one not just for beginning programmers, but also for people with a bit more experience that are keen to learn new things.
harsh_bhagtani92 