Learn Linux

No. The first chapters run in a terminal right in your browser. Later chapters move to your own machine. macOS works out of the box, and on Windows we'll show you how to use WSL.

We put Python first, then Linux, in our learning path. You don't need any programming experience for this course, but writing a little code first makes things like scripts and your PATH click faster.

You'll learn shells and terminals, the filesystem, file permissions, running programs and scripts, your PATH, stdin, stdout and stderr, pipes, tools like grep and find, package managers, and editing files from the command line.

This course takes about 10 hours. That's enough to be comfortable in a terminal for day-to-day development work. Server administration is a deeper topic, and you'll pick more of it up as you deploy real projects.

Yes! It's free to create an account and start learning. You'll get all the immersive and interactive features for free for a few chapters. After that, if you still haven't paid for a membership, you'll be in read-only (content only) mode.

We use AI more than most tech companies - not just to build Boots and the Training Grounds, but also to assist us in our coding work... and we're still hiring developers! The demand for technical talent hasn't gone away. Companies need developers that are AI savvy and can modernize their codebases. The way developers work is changing rapidly, but the demand for developers who can build great software remains high. We teach software development skills for the modern AI assisted world, and also have some AI specific courses like how to build your own Agent.

It's completely up to you. The time it will take you to be "job ready" will depend on how much you already know, how often you study, and how long you study for. That said, the backend career path takes many people about 12 months.

• How long to become a backend developer

Absolutely! If you built it, use it. You'll build several personal projects while completing our curriculum, and our final course about finding jobs will show you how to construct a job-ready portfolio.

We're not a $10,000 bootcamp. We're not a $50,000 university degree. We are a self-paced, gamified online learning platform for learning back-end web development and computer science. You can learn with us for the price of a gym membership.

We focus on teaching backend-development and data-related skills, which is somewhat of a rarity in online learning. We're also focused on solving what we believe is the hardest problem with online learning: boredom. If you prefer coding rather than watching, and your struggle with online learning is staying motivated and engaged, we think you'll like learning with us.

• Read about our methodology