This article originally appeared on Uncubed.
A few years ago, if you wanted to learn coding you had to buy a 20-pound paperback with some cute animal on the cover and then navigate through hundreds of pages of dense, obscure type.
Now all it takes is an app.
Check out five great apps that promise to teach you how to code.
Swifty
Through a series of more than 200 short tutorials, Swifty will teach you how to build apps of your own in Swift, the Apple-developed programming language for iOS and macOS. You can download it for the iPhone here – the first two lessons are free, after that there’s a one-time fee of $2.99 to unlock the rest of the chapters.
SoloLearn
Billed as the largest community of mobile learners, the ten apps from SoloLearn offer instruction in Python 3, C++, Java, and more through videos, games, and quizzes. Available for Android and iOS, the apps are free.
Lrn
If you’re getting started with front-end development, Lrn’s mini-quizzes in HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and Javascript will improve your understanding of the language of programming. Lrn is available for iOS and available soon for Android—unlocking all the courses runs $6.99.
Javvy
From the creators of Swifty, Javvy takes much the same approach to Java, offering more than 150 interactive, brief tutorials in the object-oriented language. You can get it on iOS and Android—unlocking additional features and lessons runs from one to eight dollars.
Hopscotch
Alright, technically Hopscotch is an app for kids, but if you need a seriously soft entry into the world of sequencing, conditionals, and loops, their recently released iOS app is the place to start.
