Build your free backend developer path

We skipped Python for Everybody (Coursera, 120 hours). It is a five-course specialization pitched at a general data-literacy audience, so a good chunk of it is web scraping and spreadsheet-style data work you do not need yet. CS50P covers the same beginner ground in 36 hours and spends that time on exceptions, unit tests, file I/O, and regular expressions, which is what you want before writing server code.

We skipped Intro to SQL: Querying and Managing Data (Khan Academy, 8 hours). It is a good interactive pass at creating tables, SELECT, WHERE, JOIN, and GROUP BY, and eight hours is not long enough to get comfortable with any of them. freeCodeCamp's Relational Database course runs 60 hours in a real Linux shell, so you finish having designed tables and written joins against PostgreSQL instead of a browser sandbox.

We skipped The Odin Project's NodeJS Path (120 hours) here, and it is not a knock on the course: it covers Express, PostgreSQL, authentication, and deployment, which is more ground than our pick. It assumes you are already working through The Odin Project's own curriculum, and it awards no certificate. freeCodeCamp's Back End Development and APIs stands on its own, and the free verified certificate at the end gives you something to point at on an application.

We skipped Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science (MIT, 50 hours). It is MIT's second core CS course and it spends its time on probability, statistics, and Monte Carlo methods, which points at data science rather than backend work. CS50 works through C before it reaches Python, so you meet arrays, memory, and sorting somewhere you can actually watch them behave, and those are what a technical interview asks about.