You Need To Learn How To Program Make a free weekly coding
lesson your New Year’s resolution. Photograph by
iStockphoto/Thinkstock. If you’re looking for a New Year’s
resolution, let me suggest an idea that you might not have
considered: You should learn computer programming. Specifically,
you should sign up for Code Year, a new project that aims to
teach neophytes the basics of programming over the course of
2012. Code Year was put together by Codecademy,* a startup that
designs clever, interactive online tutorials. Codecademy’s
founders, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, argue that everyone
should know how to program—that learning to code is becoming as
important as knowing how to read and write. I concur. So if you
don’t know how to program, why not get started this week? Come
on, it’ll be fun! Code Year’s minimum commitment is one new
lesson every week. The company says that it will take a person
of average technical skill about five hours to complete a
lesson, so you’re looking at about an hour of training ev