Coding for Beginners: Tutorials to Help New Developers

Do you want to learn more technical skills but don’t know where to start? Explore our range of beginner-friendly tutorials to build your skills and launch your next project.

In this list, you’ll find tutorials on Developer Fundamentals, Programming Languages, Machine Learning, and Website Development.

Developer Fundamentals

A Linux Command Line Primer The command-line interface is a powerful method for issuing commands to your computer or a remote cloud server. This tutorial introduces the command line with an interactive terminal you can launch in your browser.

How To Use SQL Structured Query Language — commonly known as SQL — is used to define, control, manipulate, and query data held in a relational database. SQL was first developed in the 1970s and is the predominant language used to manage relational database management systems today. Ideal for managing structured data (data that can fit neatly into an existing data model), SQL is an essential tool for developers and system administrators in a wide variety of contexts. Also, because of its maturity and prevalence, candidates with SQL experience are highly sought after for jobs across industries.

How To Deploy a Static Website to the Cloud with DigitalOcean App Platform If you’ve built a static website in a local environment, the next step is to decide how to publish it to the web. One way to publish your site is to deploy it as an application through App Platform, a DigitalOcean service that offers free hosting for three static sites. This tutorial will guide you through all the steps of deploying a static website to the cloud using App Platform, GitHub (a software development platform), and GitHub’s Desktop Application.

Programming Languages

How To Code in JavaScript JavaScript, a high-level, object-based, dynamic scripting language, is a popular tool for making web pages interactive. Follow this tutorial series to learn JavaScript basics and create a “Hello, World” program.

How to Code in Python Python is a readable and versatile programming language used with applications ranging from web development to machine learning. It is an excellent tool for both new learners and experienced developers alike.

How To Code in React.js React is a popular JavaScript framework for creating front-end applications, such as user interfaces that allow users to interact with programs. Created by Facebook, it has gained popularity by enabling developers to create fast applications using an intuitive programming paradigm that ties JavaScript with an HTML-like syntax known as JSX.

How to Code in PHP PHP is a popular server scripting language known for creating dynamic and interactive web pages. Follow this tutorial series to learn the foundations of PHP, including how to create a “Hello, World” program.

How to Code in TypeScript TypeScript is an extension of the JavaScript language that uses JavaScript’s runtime with a compile-time type checker. This combination allows developers to use the full JavaScript ecosystem and language features while also providing optional static type-checking, enum data types, classes, and interfaces. This series will show you the syntax you need to get started with TypeScript, allowing you to leverage its typing system to make scalable, enterprise-grade code.

How to Code in Go Go (or GoLang) is a modern programming language originally developed by Google that uses high-level syntax similar to scripting languages. It is popular for its minimal syntax and innovative handling of concurrency, as well as for the tools it provides for building native binaries on foreign platforms.

Machine Learning

How to Create an Intelligent Chatbot In this tutorial, you will create a chatbot that uses the OpenWeather API to tell the user the current weather in any city, and which is intelligent enough to communicate with the user in natural language. You will also learn the fundamentals of integrating a chatbot with an API.

An Introduction to Computer Vision OpenCV, or Open Source Computer Vision Library, is a powerful library used for image processing and image recognition. The library has a massive community and has been used extensively in many fields, from face detection to interactive art. It was first built in C++, but bindings have been created for different languages, such as Python and Java. In this project, you will create a web app that will allow users to detect circles in an uploaded image.

Introduction to PyTorch: Build a Neural Network to Recognize Handwritten Digits In this tutorial, you will build, train, and evaluate deep neural networks in PyTorch, a framework developed by Facebook AI Research for deep learning. When compared to other deep learning frameworks, like Tensorflow, PyTorch is a beginner-friendly framework with debugging features that aid in the building process. It’s also highly customizable for advanced users, with researchers and practitioners using it at companies like Facebook and Tesla.

How To Build a Neural Network to Translate Sign Language into English Computer vision is a subfield of computer science that aims to extract a higher-order understanding from images and videos. This powers technologies such as fun video chat filters, your mobile device’s face authenticator, and self-driving cars. In this tutorial, you’ll use computer vision to build an American Sign Language translator for your webcam. As you work through the tutorial, you’ll use OpenCV, a computer vision library. You will also use PyTorch to build a deep neural network and onnx to export your neural network.

Website Development

How To Build a Website with HTML If you are interested in building and designing websites, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a great place to start. This project-based tutorial series will introduce you to HTML and its methods by building a personal website using our demonstration site as a model. After building your website, you can deploy it to the cloud on DigitalOcean’s App Platform for free.

How To Build a Website with CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to control the presentation of websites. Alongside HTML and JavaScript, CSS is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web. If you understand the fundamentals of HTML and are looking to grow your front-end development skills, learning CSS is a great next step. In this tutorial series, you will learn CSS by building a personal website.

How to Set Up Your First Gatsby Website Gatsby is a React framework that allows you to create static and serverless apps. Gatsby websites are different from traditional websites because they are usually deployed on a content delivery network (CDN) and are content-agnostic. The advantage of deploying from a CDN is that there is less latency and websites are usually served to the client faster.

How to Develop Websites with Vue.js This series provides a starting point for building websites with the front-end JavaScript framework Vue.js. Created in 2014 by Evan You (formally of Google), Vue.js is often described as a combination of React and Angular, borrowing the prop-driven development of React and the templating power of Angular. By the end of this series, you will have the tools to develop websites that focus on traditional HTML and CSS, while still taking advantage of the robustness and scalability of a front-end framework.

How To Install WordPress on Ubuntu 20.04 with a LAMP Stack WordPress is a popular open-source technology for creating websites and blogs. Used by 63% of all websites that use a content management system (CMS), WordPress sites represent 36% of all websites that are currently online. There are many different approaches to getting access to WordPress, and some setup processes are more complex than others. This tutorial is intended for those who desire to install and administer a WordPress instance on an unmanaged cloud server via the command line.