Codelearn is a website which intends to allow programmers and non-programmers to learn various programming languages by offering a variety of interactive web-based courses.

Demoing the platform at #Alpha, the product and startup showcase at #NAMA conferenceHemanth Haridas, co-founder at Codelearn stated that the existing tutorials are too focused on teaching the syntax of a programming language rather than focusing on app development itself. Further, he also noted that setting up a development environment on any computer has been a pain point for many budding app developers.

The company intends to address these problems by providing tutorials and an in-browser app development environment on its website, in a bid to reduce the lead time for budding developers to only focus on developing apps. What’s interesting though is that the company offers these tutorials on a need-to know basis rather than the traditional chapter model. i.e. it provide information only about what is needed during a specific course and ignores all the smaller level details which may not be needed for a programmer.

Languages: The site is currently in private beta and offers a Ruby On Rails app development environment and only a single course on Ruby on Rails at the time of writing article, but it plans to add more app development environments and tutorials on these web technologies and frameworks shortly. The company also claims to have emulated the complete Rails environment on its website, allowing programmers to learn and test their written code for correctness.

When we checked, we noticed that each tutorial on the website is divided into different modules and each module has a set of chapters and instructions to build a rails app. Each chapter is followed by a task, which allows programmers to attempt a specific task related to that chapter, however we noticed that the test framework is still not live and the company notes that it is fine tuning the test framework at the time of writing this article.

The app development environment features four different sections – Console which allows programmers to execute terminal-based commands, File Browser which allows programmers to browse through files in the installed package, Code Editor which allows one to edit code of any files present in the package and App Output which shows the output of the program.

Other Players: US-based Codeacademy offers a similar platform through which it offers online lessons and an online development environment for budding developers. The company currently offers tutorials in Javascript, Python, Ruby and jQuery among others. The site also allows programmers to create courses in any programming topics which will be later featured on the portal.

Sparsha Learning Technologies also offers a service called Coderipe which intends to offer a hands on experience with programming to students and allow teachers to create and deliver activity based learning content. The service currently offers support for programming languages like as C, C++, JAVA, Perl, and Python.

Besides this, there are other players like Code School, Programr, and Code Avengers.