Programming
Courses on software development: languages, frameworks, testing practice and the craft of building and shipping applications.
Verified courses first, then the rest of the category
Harvard's AI course, published free as OpenCourseWare. Seven lecture topics work through search, knowledge representation, uncertainty, optimisation, machine learning, neural networks and language, with Python projects attached to each. It is explicitly a follow-on rather than a first course: the stated prerequisite is CS50x or roughly a year of Python experience, and the material assumes the learner can already write and debug their own programs.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00006Verified Re-check due Direct course review
Harvard's introductory computer science course, taught through eleven weeks that begin in Scratch and move into C, then Python, SQL and web development with Flask. It spends unusually long on what happens underneath a program, covering arrays, memory, pointers and data structures, before reaching higher-level languages, and ends with a self-directed final project. The course materials are free; a certificate is a separate paid option through edX.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00001Verified Re-check due Direct course review
An hour of developer-facing training on building for the Shopify platform, as distinct from the courses aimed at merchants. Free and open without an account.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00030Verified Re-check due Direct course review
An accessibility course covering how to make websites and web applications usable by more people. Part of the web.dev Learn series, published free by Google as written modules with no account required.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00010Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A thirty-nine module CSS course published by web.dev, written by members of the Chrome team with outside contributors. It is unusually complete for a free course: alongside the box model, selectors, specificity and layout it covers logical properties, container queries, anchor positioning, view transitions and blend modes, which are the parts most introductory material stops short of. Open in the browser with no account, and a quiz at the end awards a badge.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00004Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A responsive design course covering how to build sites that hold up across the range of devices and contexts people actually use. Part of the web.dev Learn series, published free by Google with no account required.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00026Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A course dedicated entirely to HTML forms, which are the part of the platform most often built badly and the part with the most direct consequences for users. Part of the web.dev Learn series, free in the browser.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00025Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A structured HTML course from the web.dev Learn series, presented as an overview aimed at developers across the range from novice to expert rather than at absolute beginners only. Written modules read in the browser, published free by Google with no account required.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00003Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A course on images for the web, spanning format selection, responsive images and the performance consequences of both. Part of the web.dev Learn series, free and open in the browser.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00024Verified Re-check due Direct course review
The JavaScript entry in the web.dev Learn series, described by its publisher as an in-depth treatment of the language basics rather than a tour of frameworks. Written modules read in the browser, published free by Google with no account required.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00022Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A web performance course aimed at people new to the subject, framed by its publisher as an aspect of user experience rather than a purely technical concern. Part of the web.dev Learn series, free and open in the browser.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00023Verified Re-check due Direct course review
Mozilla’s free web development curriculum, structured as getting-started modules, a core sequence covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility and version control, and extension modules on asynchronous JavaScript, tooling, server-side work, performance and testing. Includes skill tests and an in-browser playground, and sits alongside the MDN reference material most working developers already use.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00005Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A lecture series that builds neural networks from nothing, in code, one line at a time. It opens by writing an automatic differentiation engine by hand and ends by building a GPT and then its tokeniser, with the intermediate lectures constructing a character level language model in progressively more capable forms. The videos are published free on YouTube with accompanying code. The stated prerequisites are solid Python and introductory calculus, and the format is long form: single lectures frequently run over two hours.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00007Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A free deep learning course that starts by training and deploying a working model in the first lesson and only then works backwards into the theory. It covers computer vision, natural language processing, tabular data with random forests, collaborative filtering and building a model from scratch, taught in PyTorch and the fastai library through Jupyter notebooks. It assumes about a year of coding experience, preferably Python, and no mathematics beyond school level. The edition published at the time of checking is labelled 2022.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00014Verified Re-check due Direct course review
An MIT course about the tools a computer science degree assumes you will pick up on your own: the shell, the command line environment, editors, debugging and profiling, version control, and packaging. The 2026 run adds sessions on agentic coding and code quality. It is deliberately narrow in a useful way, teaching craft around programming rather than programming itself, and the materials are published free under a Creative Commons licence.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00002Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A project course that builds one full-stack application, an online store with authentication, product search, a cart and card checkout, rather than teaching each topic in isolation. Around eighteen hours across fourteen modules covers Next.js, styled components, a GraphQL schema and server, client-side queries, permissions, and roughly five hours of testing with Jest and React Testing Library at the end. Sold as two packages, the smaller containing the first five modules.
Not independently verified
Eleven and a half hours teaching Python specifically through AI use cases, rather than teaching Python first and AI later. Beginner level, from DeepLearning.AI.
Not independently verified
Design driven by algorithms rather than by hand, sitting between the design and programming subjects. Free from The Open University, startable without signing up, with a free statement of participation on completion.
Not independently verified
A written Angular tutorial covering the framework in short lessons with runnable examples. Published free by W3Schools with no account required.
Not independently verified
Michigan’s applied data science sequence, one of the most taken Python data programmes published. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
A written Bash tutorial covering shell scripting in short lessons with worked examples. Published free by W3Schools, with certification available separately.
Not independently verified
A video course that teaches JavaScript from first principles without a framework, working directly with the language and the browser. It covers the parts beginners usually skip, such as scope and closures, prototypes and `this`, flow control and data types, alongside DOM work, events, fetching data and ES modules, with three separate rounds of practice exercises between the teaching modules. Sold as two packages, where the smaller one contains the first six modules only.
Not independently verified
A written tutorial on Bootstrap, the CSS framework, in the W3Schools format of short lessons and editable examples. Free without an account.
Not independently verified
A short course built with Anthropic and published on the DeepLearning.AI platform, running about 1h47m at beginner level. Partner-built courses like this one are taught around a specific vendor’s tools, which is worth knowing before starting.
Not independently verified
About this subject
Courses on writing software: languages and their fundamentals, frameworks and libraries, testing, tooling and the parts of the job that sit around the code. This is the oldest and best-served subject in online learning, which is both an advantage and a problem. There is a great deal of excellent free material, and there is a great deal of material that teaches a framework version nobody uses any more.
Guidance
Verification tells you that a course delivers the material it advertises. It cannot tell you whether it teaches good practice. These are the things worth checking yourself.
A course on JavaScript and a course on a JavaScript framework age at completely different rates. Language fundamentals stay useful for years; framework specifics can be out of date within one major release. If you are starting out, the language course is usually the better investment, and it makes the framework course shorter later.
Screenshots of an old interface, a deprecated API or an installation step that no longer works will cost you more time than the course saves. Where a provider publishes a last-updated date we record it. Where they do not, the listing shows only the date we checked the page, which tells you about our research rather than about the course.
Watching someone type is not learning to type. The courses that produce competence tend to have exercises you complete, a project you build, or an environment you work in. The format is recorded on each listing where the provider states it, and the summary usually says whether the material is written, video, or interactive.
A course that says it assumes a year of Python usually means it. Starting an advanced course early is the most common way people conclude they cannot program, when in fact they simply started three steps along. The level on each listing comes from what the provider states.
Programming is unusual in how much serious teaching is published free of charge by universities, browser vendors and open-source projects. A paid course can still be worth it for structure, feedback or a specific niche, but in this subject it is worth knowing what is free before deciding.
Standards
The published standard applies unchanged. These are the checks that tend to matter most in this subject.
A verification says nothing about code quality, whether the practices taught are current, or whether the course will lead to employment. We do not review the correctness of teaching material.
Questions
We make no claim about that, and we treat any course that promises it as a claim to examine rather than to repeat. Verification confirms the course delivers what it advertises. Hiring depends on many things a course does not control.
A verification is dated and has a re-check date, and it stops being current when that date passes. It is not a permanent statement. For unreviewed listings we record the date we checked the page, which is not the same as the date the course was updated.
We do not rank courses and we never publish a best-of list. The directory orders verified courses first because those are the ones anyone has checked, not because they are better than the rest.
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