Codeyear 2012: Learn how to write your own code!

2012 will be the year for those of us who have avoided the jargon, impossible concepts, and difficulties of writing our own code. Those of us who used to program are finding that the new languages are just that...new languages.

Why do we want to write our own code? The bottom line is that programming literacy is becoming as important as reading literacy, but years of study are not needed now that programming languages have been getting closer to plain language for decades.

But even with high level languages, programming and coding is still a foreign language that must be learned in order to get proficiency and the language must be used in order to maintain proficiency.

With an ability to do even basic coding we can work on our own websites, trick out the text and style in our blogs, and make our computers work or us, rather than on us.

Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, gives this advice to the serious student:

"If you want to invest two years in something that will help you, you would do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA."

Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and writer says something that applies to all of us,

"If we don't learn to program, we risk being programmed ourselves... program or be programmed"

But still, who wants to get a degree in computer programming? Is a high level of investment necessary?

Maybe not, so let's see if there are any answers at the Code Academy site.

Well, well. The signup process is rather perfunctory. Just go to CodeAcademy and get started.

Enter an email address and get a bare bones text message that says "Success!" or something like that.

Bang! Check the email and find the first message from CodeAcademy Team.

The email has a large red banner that is labeled "Start Your Free Course".

Two courses are offered for Week One are:

"Get Started With Programming"

"A Fun Project To Sharpen Your New Skills"

A little exploring through "Get Started With Programming" revealed that there are five simple tasks in the first lesson

First, we enter our name in quotes, then press enter. Our name is fine. Then we do it again and add the command for finding out how many characters are in our name.

Next, we do some basic math by typing in a simple calculation, like 2+2 and hitting the enter key to find out how easy it is to get the result of 4!

Finally, we deliberately type our name without the quotes and get our first "reference error".

This is easy! This is fun! This is fast!

Of course, more advanced lessons lie ahead, but there is simply no better and easier way to get started than to go to this site and start learning!

Better yet, there are ways to do this with friends and to keep up with each other as everyone works their way through the lessons.

According to LifeHacker,

One of the goals of Code Year is to actually spread the word about the importance of learning to code (and that anyone can do it), with support from organizations such as Y Combinator, TechStars, Girl Develop It, and HackNY.

Codeacademy was a program that was developed for America's under priviliged and web disconnected youth. This was part of a much larger set of Summer programs that were put on by the White House in collaboration with several organizations.

The programs included Code+Summer, Summer Jobs+, Codeacademy, SMASH academy and Level Playing Field Institute.

For more information see this TechCrunch article.