Resources and courses I love!

https://codefirstgirls.com/

I love love love Code First Girls - I did their Web Development course back in 2019 (when my son was 4 weeks old) and became an instructor with them on their python and SQL courses during the pandemic. Their process has now changed in that you learn alongside getting a job I think or they put you in a job. I have friends who have done this and now work in the tech industry. Code First Girls have a range of short courses, longer courses, ones with jobs attached ones that are just a few hours during the evenings. The reason I love them is that when you do a course you are often added to a slack channel (slack is like online WhatsApp of sorts - apologies if you already are familiar with slack) of like minded women who are also learning and this can help be more than just 'another online course'. They sometimes have homework type sessions where you can ask questions and get feedback - again something I desperately needed when learning to code.

I'm not going to lie CS50 is quite a chunk of work https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50-introduction-computer-science but my goodness it is insanely amazing! The guy who runs this course is a total a rockstar - never thought i'd say that about a computer science lecturer. The course website says it takes a while but you don't have to do every single bit and you don't have to do the exercises. I did this when I was extremely busy being a mum and I did about 50% of the homework and watched about 80% of lectures (some whilst washing up or in a car park whilst my son napped). This is something if you are interested in the real foundational bits of programming. It has a lot of first principles - like binary and bytes etc. Which I think sometimes fill in the gaps that higher level courses miss out.  

https://www.datacamp.com/

I used datacamp a lot during my early days. It's subscription based. I'd recommend it if you like doing task based learning. Looking back now I'm not sure I would have spent so much time working through it as it wasn't the best style for me. But I have friends who really liked this style of learning. One thing it is good at is learning paths, e.g. understanding what the difference is between a data analyst, a data engineer a data scientist and what bits of what you should learn for each role. 

 https://www.youtube.com/@coreyms 

I really like this guy - he makes complicated things seem simple, and he has a friendly tone. He mostly has videos of his screen of him coding something. He talks you through things as he codes them.