Programming Tutorial Sites

Thanks to @jon_stahl for kicking this off and to everyone who added sites over the years. The thread is a useful historical snapshot, but many older tutorials show deprecated or insecure patterns — a point raised by @sarehu — so an updated, practical approach helps. @Denniz was right to suggest grouping by language; @codedrealm’s wide topic list shows how quickly a link list can become overwhelming without a simple learning path.

A compact, modern strategy is to combine four resource types: (1) the official language/runtime reference for API and spec, (2) a single project-based interactive curriculum to build portfolio pieces, (3) a trusted Q&A/community site for debugging and nuance, and (4) coding-challenge sites plus active open-source repos for practice and idiomatic code. Favor maintained, recent content; prefer multiple corroborating sources rather than a single tutorial.

Practical vetting checklist that fills gaps left by raw link lists: check the publication date and target runtime (for PHP, watch differences between older PHP 4/5 examples and PHP 7/8+), prefer examples that include error handling, and avoid tutorials that mix presentation code with insecure shortcuts (for example, unsanitized SQL concatenation). Good questions and answers include a minimal reproducible example, exact runtime/version, and any error text.

PHP security example (use prepared statements rather than string concatenation):

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=app','user','pass',[
    PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION,
]);

$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE email = :email');
$stmt->execute([':email' => $email]);
$user = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

Grouping resources by language (as @Denniz suggested) and keeping one curated path per language — official reference + one project course + one practice site + reading recent open-source — makes a long list actually useful.