Tool of the week: Codeacademy
What is it? Free tutorials in basic JavaScript
How is it of use to journalists? The rise in data journalism, an interest in Hacks/Hackers meetups and collaboration between journalists and developers has led to many journalists to express a wish to start coding. But where to start?
Codeacademy is a learning tool that offers tutorials to get you started. So far there are only a couple of courses on the site but they are free and superbly designed.
The homepage gets you to begin entering a bit of JavaScript and you soon find yourself progressing though the tutorial. There is a progress bar to show you how much of the course you have completed and reward badges to give you the equivalent of the teacher’s gold star.
![Codeacademy](https://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Codeacademy.jpg)
You might well find you quickly learn simple JavaScript that has a useful application for you as a journalist. For example, within the first five minutes you learn that writing “.length” at the end of a word or phrase gives you the character count. You can then open an editor (using Chrome from a Mac the command is ALT+CMD+J), paste the headline of a news story, add “.length” and you will have the character count of the headline.
![JavaScript](https://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/JavaScript.jpg)