Learning to code? You’re gonna need some business classes, too

Treehouse, the learn-to-code company, is now offering business and startup education courses in addition to its library of programming courses.

The new material will cover topics essential to the startup community, such as how to raise funding from venture capitalists, how to do basic search engine optimization, how to price and sell a product, and how to do small-business accounting.

In short, the company thinks that programmers at startups — even non-founder programmers — should have an idea of how a business works. This basic understanding makes the employee (or founder) more well rounded and allows her to make better contributions to the whole organization, likely increasing said organization’s overall chance of success.

Each business course from Treehouse comes with a series of short instructional videos and a few quizzes. For a good idea of Treehouse’s video quality, check out this “quick tip” from the business series on using a specific productivity technique:

Treehouse started out teaching web users how to build basic websites in HTML, adding courses on PHP, jQuery, and WordPress development throughout last year.

In recent months, the company inked a book deal to expand its offerings to other formats and also started bringing its instruction into high schools where a coding education could make a big difference for at-risk teenagers.

While a small cadre of promising startups are teaching folks to code online, we find Treehouse’s breadth — breadth of instruction topics, of format, of audience — to be a unique aspect that sets it apart from its worthy competitors. Its $25-$50 monthly pricing structure is not for everyone (competitor Codecademy‘s online courses are free of charge), but this company continues to do interesting things that stand to benefit not only its customers but also the startup community as a whole.