I live in an area of St. Louis called the Central West End, and we are fortunate to have not one but two world-class computer coding training facilities located here: Launchcode and Claim Academy. Both have been in operation for several years and have trained numerous programming professionals through some innovative instruction techniques and by focusing on non-traditional sources for their students. By non-traditional, I mean classes designed for people that have little or no formal programming experience and who want to make a mid-course career correction. In this post for a local blog, I describe their programs, their cost, and their advantages in training newbie programmers.

If you are interested in a programming career, you might want to first read a blog post that I wrote many years ago on how to pick the right online class for Computerworld. I cover things such as knowing what type of learner you are (visual, auditory, etc), figuring out if you have the necessary bandwidth to devote to the classes, thinking about what other support you will need besides the lectures, and understanding what learning programming skills really means.