Giraffe Academy

Giraffe Academy is a programming tutorial channel run by Mike Dane. He has been making free coding lessons on YouTube for years, and his beginner courses have also been shared widely on other learning sites.

The videos teach programming languages from the ground up. There are full beginner courses in C, Dart and React, and step by step series on SQL databases and MongoDB. Lessons are calm and clearly paced, with code typed out on screen and explained line by line. Some recent uploads try out building small games with AI coding tools. Each language has its own playlist, so it is easy to pick up where you left off.

Some highlights include:

A single video that walks through the C programming language, from variables and loops to pointers, in one sitting.

A four hour beginners course in Dart, the language behind Google’s Flutter app framework.

A long React course that builds up the skills needed to make interactive websites.

The channel has over 310,000 subscribers. New uploads have slowed, but the back catalogue of complete courses remains a solid free resource.

For anyone curious about software engineering, this is a gentle place to start. C is the language used in a great deal of embedded and electronic engineering, and SQL is used in almost every business that stores data. Working through a full course here is a good test of whether programming suits you before choosing a computer science or software engineering course.