What’s Next is a free website that provides collection of free resources to learn various programming languages. If you want to learn any language, it will show which books / tutorials / articles you should read for that. All the books etc. that it recommends are completely free and online, so you don’t need to buy anything.
What’s Next does not creates any tutorials of its own; instead, it finds the best tutorials, books, and articles from internet, and lists them here. And it does not gives tons of tutorials; it only shows a curated list of very limited resources that are good enough to get you started.
As of now, this website lists resources for Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Python, and CSS, and Programming in general. I am sure this list would be expanded soon. For each of these languages, it shows Resources for Beginners, Resources for Experts, Interview Questions, and Most Popular GITHUB Projects.
Under Resources for Beginners and Resources for Experts, it basically lists resources from internet that you can use, depending on your level of knowledge of that language. If you are a beginner, then obviously start from “Resources for Beginners”. Depending on the language you chose, you will be able to see links to online books, tutorials, and articles. As I mentioned earlier, all resources are completely free.
Similar, if you do have basic knowledge of the language, move to “Resources for Experts”. This also pretty much contains similar type of content: books, tutorials, articles.
Each resource has the URL of the resource, as well as a brief description.
Next to these is the section for “Interview Questions”. This section lists some common interview questions about that programming language. These are not exhaustive in nature, and I found that normally they list less than 10 questions. But most importantly, the website doesn’t gives answers to the questions. So, you will need to search the web or the learning resources listed earlier. I really hope they had given links to answers to the questions as well.
The last section is “Most Popular GitHub Projects”. This section lists those projects on GitHub that extensively use that language. As the projects are open source, you can explore them and go through the code. This will definitely help in strengthening your knowledge of that language.
That’s all that this website provides. There is no need to login or create an account; just go to the website, choose the programming language that you want to learn, and get started with the resources for that language. As simple as that.
My Opinion of What’s Next:
A few days back we reviewed a website called LessonsPath that lets you create online courses by using resources available on the web. What’s Next seems to be a website that can be used as an input to that website: take resources listed in What’s Next, and use them to create courses using LessonsPath. This will give a more sequential learning experience. Also, it will let you track your progress as well, which What’s Next lacks.
By itself as well, What’s Next is definitely good for basic learning of popular programming languages. The resources listed here are definitely not exhaustive, but they can surely give you a good feel of the programming languages. And if you have been feeling scared to start learning any language because you have seen thick books of that language, then What’s Next will let you get over that initial hesitation by showing easy to learn resources.
Do checkout What’s Next. For more focused learning, you can check other resources like WiBit.net, Code Avengers, and Academit.