Firstly, I'd like to apologise for the dire state of most VLEs. They arrogantly assume that people will always have an internet connection, and so exclude a large portion of their audience by not allowing users to continue learning without a network connection. I have an incredible connection both at home and at work, however I frequently travel and even . The point me jumping up onto this soap-box? Progressive web-apps! Progressive webapps are the buzzword of the day, encompassing a few trends that have been pretty prevalent over the past few years - namely, making webpages work irrespective of device size or speed, making things work offline, giving more control to native resources and making everything faster. All of these things are supported by browser technology, and have been in some form for a great deal many years, however the brilliant folks at Google, Opera, Mozilla and Samsung have been working on introducing new and better methods of achieving these goals - (
an excellent resource by Addy Osmani is available here).
If you're learning about developing in the web domain, whether building a personal website, or building a complicated web application (in a team?), or even are just offering up some kind of API for consumption in the web - Remember your current frustrations, and try to make it a progressive web-app!
Okay, now stepping down from my soap-box ... I experienced much the same frustrations as you whilst first trying to learn about tech and code, although this sadly predated good VLEs such as Codeacademy - My "solution" was to download a dump of most of the content which now forms
http://textfiles.com. It's a wealth of archived information which many people overlook, which is especially ironic as many of the ideas first presented in here keep coming up again and again in tech.
More practically, there are a few decent tutorials on learning Javascript which work completely offline and offer a workshop-style guide - The first of these is available here
https://github.com/sethvincent/javascripting which is purely based in NodeJS (it talks about installing NodeJS, but if you have any issues feel free to ask away here and I'm sure someone will help). The other items in this series are available here:
http://nodeschool.io/#workshopper-list
I wasn't aware of any other such workshop-like things, and a few minutes googling around didn't reveal anything else so these could be unique! It might be worth checking out your smartphone/table appstore of choice (if applicable) as I distinctly recall seeing some relevant stuff on Android (haven't tried it though so I can't speak for its quality).
Something else that it might seriously be worth doing is buying, or otherwise obtaining, books or ebooks on the subject. There are many "getting started" books out there, however I don't think all that many of them are any good. Some gems I've read in the past include
Learn C the hard way,
Beej's Guide to C Programming,
Learning Java,
Eloquent Javascript, and of course the infamous
Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby.
On a side-note, recently I've started using
Safari Books Online and
PacktLib (where you can read
@Costello's
book on nginx). If you're interested in either, hit me up and I'll find out if there are any discounts available.
However all of the things I've linked are ultimately just information. To learn to code, and to code well, you've gotta just remember to have fun! Think of a crazy idea, or that one piece of software you wish you had, and try and build it yourself! (You should be able to do most of that offline, but of course feel free to ask questions).
Hope this helps!
EDIT: Oh, and all those books I posted are completely free to download.