Online Programming Classes?

[mdblows]

Recent CU grad here. Majored in Econ with an emphasis in public policy. Completed their certificate program in renewable energy. While I certainly enjoy economics and understand it fairly well, I'm much more interested in energy/natural resources. I'm looking for a job will hopefully be able to combine the two. I've got a 3.0 in Econ and a 3.3 overall. I interned this past summer with a environmental consulting firm doing pretty entry level data cataloging. I also did a brief research internship this past semester with a local solar company.

While I've been applying to jobs left and right, I haven't had much luck. So while I've got the free time I decided to look into taking an entry-level programming class to help bolster my resume. I found one at Front Range Community College, but according to their residency classifications I would still be considered out of state because a) my parents live in MD and b) I'm under 23. That takes the price from ~$350 to ~$1300.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to find relatively cheap online or in-person intro level programming courses? Or any experience with applying for in-state tuition with Front Range? I have a CO driver's license, my car is registered here, and I'm also registered to vote in Boulder county, so perhaps that would help. Any advice is very appreciated.

[Buke]

MIT Open Courseware. You won't get credit but who cares.

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

[BurnHard]

2nd MIT Open Courseware. Some amazing stuff there. Much better education than you would get paying infinitely more for a certificate or college credits. Their Data Structures & Algo courses are great, I remember working through their LISP course as well (not sure what that one was listed as, it was a general programming language course that went deep into LISP). All super useful if you're really interested in coding.

In Boulder you have Boulder Digital Arts which has a solid offering of very cutting-edge tech courses, mostly in web related technologies. CU's Graduate Software Engineering Diploma/Certificate is excellent, 3x 3credit courses which cover the fundamentals with tons of hands-on work.

If all you care about is bolstering your resume, spend a week hacking with Perl and/or Python and/or JavaScript & NodeJS. Just go through Google, tons of material. A week 24/7 you'll be a ninja, and those skills will actually be used in a job as a non-software-engineer: the only coding you'd actually do are likely scripts to automate tedious data shit, and Perl & Python are your best choices there.

[The Suit]

2nd MIT Open Courseware. Some amazing stuff there. Much better education than you would get paying infinitely more for a certificate or college credits. Their Data Structures & Algo courses are great, I remember working through their LISP course as well (not sure what that one was listed as, it was a general programming language course that went deep into LISP). All super useful if you're really interested in coding.

OCW is great stuff. The LISP class Burnhard mentions is probably 6.001 - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. It actually uses Scheme, which is a LISP-like language. I helped tutor my wife through that class when she took it in 1985 and it did, and still does, an amazing job of teaching how to program, not just a particular language. It's pretty heavy-duty, though. Definitely overkill for resume-boosting.

We did the geek family thing last summer and my wife, older daughter, and I all worked our way through 6.00, which is an intro to programming using Python. It's at an approachable level of difficulty, yet still teaches you a lot about algorithms and how to program. I highly recommend it, although just today my wife was telling me she thinks they may have simplified it somewhat in the past few months.

It's just getting started, but keep an eye on MITx. I'd be surprised if they don't offer an intro programming class this fall.

[mdblows]

Thanks dudes. I'm starting at absolute ground-zero as far as programming knowledge. For now I've briefly started looking at Perl, plan on working through this guide here:
http://learn.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/

I'm thinking I just need to have a firm grasp of the basics and then when I do land a job they'll hopefully train me on the specifics related to the work I'll be doing.

[Sirshredalot]

It sounds like you want to make your way into the data monkey world.

Learn some R.

[BS720]

I don't know shit about shit, but I got this groupon today, and I'm interested in feedback. I don't know if this is thread jack, but it seems like it'd be of interest to the OP.

http://touch.groupon.com/deals/gg-dd...on&mobile=true

[fez]

Code Academy has been getting lots of buzz lately. I've checked it out and it's pretty cool. http://www.codecademy.com/

Or you can drop 10k and be just about guaranteed a ruby job after graduation (if you can get accepted) with devBootcamp http://devbootcamp.com/

[selle]

I heard good things about the "Learn X The Hard Way" books. For an intro into programming I would suggest working through http://learnpythonthehardway.org/