For anybody that might not have heard, Harvard University launched Intro to Programming with Python last year, which is a free 9-week course for complete beginners and includes a free certificate of completion at the end.

It's taught by the same professor who teaches Harvard's Intro to CS, the university's most-popular on-campus course.

The course is very hands-on with weekly problem sets and a final project that you complete through an in-browser code editor.

You can also take the course via edX but there, the certificate costs $199. If you take it through Harvard OpenCourseWare, the course is exactly the same but the certificate is entirely free.