When you start to code, you’ll quite quickly discover that much of the free material on YouTube is rather dry. There are some exceptions, of course. Perhaps one of the best examples of these is Coding Rainbow, by NYU lecturer Daniel Shiffman.
Coding rainbow is a series of YouTube videos that aims to teach “creative coding”. New episodes are posted near-daily, and they cover everything from the finer details of JavaScript, to how to apply the knowledge you’ve gained with practical projects.
As the name suggests, it’s more than a little bit inspired by LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow, which ran from 1983 to 2006, and introduced millions to the love of literature.
I’ve watched a few episodes so far, and I must say, I’m a fan. The videos are well-paced, and don’t hurry you through topics that are, by their very nature, deeply complicated. Probably the best example of this is the below video, where Shiffman explains how to use nlp-compromise – a JavaScript library used to process natural language.
Shiffman’s heavy use of green screen makes it easy to follow his lessons, and he has the best presentation style of any coding tutor I’ve ever stumbled across.
You can check out his channel here. Subscribe, and you won’t miss any future lessons. Shiffman also posts the source code to each lesson on Github, which you can download here.
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