Thinking about coding? Want to dip your feet in the water?
Codeacademy - probably the best place to start if you're
interested in coding. I've only done the "free" tracks, which are pretty good. Ruby is always recommended
as an introductory language. Give it a go!
Treehouse - not entirely free (you get 7 days), but another good
alternative. I learned a lot about Javascript here, which gave me a good headstart at CodeClan.
Exercism - this was recommended to us in our first
week at CodeClan by a former student, and it is fantastic! Probably more for advanced beginners, so if you've
completed a couple of tracks on one of the above sites, definitely give this a go. It's completely
free, and there are "mentors" who review the exercises when you submit them.
Code Wars - similar to Exercism, Code Wars is a
community based site. You can complete coding challenges to earn points ("honor"). It gives it a bit more of a
competitive/gaming edge than Exercism. You can also view other solutions after submitting yours, which is very
useful. I recommend it.
A few Ruby "gems"
Ruby Doc - as mentioned above, Ruby is a great
introductory (and beyond!) language, because it's more readable by a human. It's also a bit more
forgiving if you make mistakes. Anyway, if you're learning it, this is the one-stop shop for anything you might
need to know about which commands are available to you in Ruby.
Rubular - I stumbled upon this site when playing around
with Ruby "regular expressions" (known as REGEX). This is essentially a way of searching a string of text
in Ruby by providing a "match" to search for. It can be a real headache, and this is a very handy site to
quickly test out your expressions.