10 best Mac programming resources for beginners

Learning to program your Mac is a great idea, and there are plenty of great (and mostly free) resources out there to help you learn coding.

Codecademy is one of the most popular places for beginner programmers to start. It’s a free website packed with interactive courses that walk you through the process of coding. Codecademy turns coding into a game, and awards points and rewards for completion.

The courses are highly regarded too, covering popular subjects like Java, Python, HTML & CSS.

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Standing in stark contrast to the majority of gamified online courses is Learn The Hard Way. Originally just Learn Python The Hard Way, the course has branched out to cover other subjects such as C and SQL.

Learn The Hard Way eschews niceties such as online videos and interactivity in favour of working in the cold, hard world of the Terminal. You learn to write programs in a basic text editor, run and debug them using nothing but the command line.

See also: Why programmers think Mac OS X is the best OS to use

It sounds tough, and it often is, but this tough love approach teaches you programming like no other resource.

You don’t need amazing maths to learn to program: mostly it’s logic and problem solving rather than cracking math puzzles. However, it’s a good idea to brush up on your math skills while learning programming so you increase both skills at once. 

Khan Academy can take you right from the very basics, up to probability, statistics and beyond. It also has a lot of videos explaining computer science subjects like Big-O notation and Sorting mechanisms.

As you start to learn programming, you’ll need problems to solve. Project Euler is a collection of challenges created with programmers in mind.

According to the Project Euler website, “the intended audience includes students for whom the basic curriculum is not feeding their hunger to learn, adults whose background was not primarily mathematics but had an interest in things mathematical, and professionals who want to keep their problem solving and mathematics on the cutting edge.”

There are lots of great, free resources out there that will teach you programming. But Udemy is the place to go when you want professional computer programming training. Most people learn the two big languages: Python and Java, but there are also acclaimed courses in Swift, HTML and just about all other languages you’ll need to succeed.

Courses can be expensive, but there are frequent sales so sign up for the mailing list.

Here’s one to bookmark. Part of the Stack Exchange community, Stack Overflow is where you’ll find the answers to all your questions. You can’t be a serious programmer without a Stack Exchange account; the community here will quickly answer all of your questions.

Developed alongside iOS 10, the new Swift Playgrounds app for iPad teaches you the basics of programming with Apple’s Swift programming language. It also enables you to create basic programs on an iPad, and export them to Xcode on a Mac.

Apple has also created some great programming books for Swift, which you’ll find on the iBooks Store.

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Prove yourself in coding battle with other users. Codewars turns programming into a challenge, with users creating puzzles for each other to solve. You can solve problems in just about any language, including Python and Java. It’s a great way to learn common programming problems in a game-style environment.

Lynda is one of our favourite resources, and you can learn just about anything on Lynda. It’s programming range of tutorials isn’t as strong as a service like Udemy, but its tutorials are expertly crafted. Recently, Lynda has added courses like Python and C to its range, and it has good courses on Source Control and Computer Science.

If you’re interested in learning to code for the iPhone, then Ray Wenderlich has a range of highly rated courses. There is a range of Swift, iOS and macOS tutorials, and you can also learn Unity and Android on the same site. There are also a great range of books available to buy, although some can be quite expensive. The quality is there though, and it’s a great website to bookmark.