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When comparing edX vs Codecademy, the Slant community recommends edX for most people. In the question“What are the best websites to learn to code?” edX is ranked 4th while Codecademy is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose edX is:
Both edX and the classes are free.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
Both edX and the classes are free.
Pro Offers courses from well known schools
edX offers courses from a wide range of well known colleges and universities including Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Cornell and more.
Pro Large selection of science courses
edX offers a wide variety of science-related courses. This makes it a great resource for learning not only specific programming languages, but also other topics relating to computer science.
Pro A lot of topics (subjects)
Topics include biology, business, chemistry, computer science, economics, finance, electronics, engineering, food and nutrition, history, humanities, law, literature, math, medicine, music, philosophy, physics, science, statistics and more.
Pro Offer certificates for some courses
Pro Interactivity
Right from the start, users write code. They start small in an environment that has constant feedback and gradually progress to more complex concepts. Users can see code results instantly, giving great feedback.
Pro Excellent progression
Codeacademy doesn't overwhelm beginners with information. It gives bite-sized information, the bare minimum needed to finish a task and get to the next one. As the course progresses, it slowly fills in background information.
Pro Good editor
Codeacademy has a powerful, beginner-friendly integrated development environment (IDE) that can also be used outside of curriculum.
Pro Bite-sized lessons
Each lesson in code-academy focuses on a single concept, and repetition is provided to drill the concept.
Pro Mostly free content & best progression series for beginners
Pro Community forums
It has forums which can be used to discuss with other learners
Cons
Con Lack of engagement in the forums
edX does not have the same forum participation from both students and instructors that other websites do, and the form of engagement often does not encourage discussion.
Con Courses aren't always available
While edX does offer some self-paced courses, you may end up waiting for the course of your choice to be run.
Con The forums are difficult to navigate
The forums are difficult to sort by date and topic, and are unintuitive to navigate.
Con Not the best structure for quick refreshers
The content of the lessons is aimed very much at people just starting to learn how to code. This is perfect for beginners but if you want to use Codecademy to refresh your knowledge the lessons are not designed to be quickly done.
Con Lack of context
Codecademy is great for providing a hands-on approach, but there is a lack of context regarding how to start a project in real life. While users may learn how to code using Codecademy's interface, they may not have any idea how to code independently.
Con Sticks to pretty basic
Con Deleted a lot of content
A lot of free content has been taken away, for example the PHP course was removed from the site.
Con Buggy
Codecademy is known to have many bugs which interfere with the editor, resulting in error messages despite having the correct answer.
Con Allows infinite loops to run
If you run an infinite loop, the browser freezes. Many other similar websites will give you an error, preventing the loop from running. Though not a bug, the lack of feature to stop infinite loops from running can be quite frustrating to beginners.
