Around 60% of the world is unable to access the internet and make use of its vast resources. Of the 40% that do, not all will benefit from the relative speed and reliability with which you are likely reading this article. As many things in our lives, it’s something we can often take for granted and forget about those less fortunate.

The content amounts to over 30GB worth which is easy to see why this could be an issue in internet-starved countries.

The whole concept of the web is to connect machines together, and enable information to be shared freely between them. You will find few of your contacts who have never looked something up in Wikipedia, shared updates with their friends and loved ones over Facebook, or used Google to search for how to do something… 

Learning to program is an ongoing process with more to learn every day if you want to stay on the cutting-edge, and as such requires many hours of in-depth study which can be difficult without internet access. If you then want to market and build a business around your apps, then that’s further fields to add to your CV.

It’s in Google’s best interest to get as many people online as possible, hence the company’s “Project Loon” research which aims to provide airborne internet access to those on the ground in hard-to-reach areas of the globe. This will be a long-term project, but in the meantime Google is releasing an “offline developer kit” for people to get started learning the basics…

The pack includes four DVDs which contains; 

• The entire I/O Dev Bytes Series 
• Full Google Udacity course videos (Android, App Engine, HTML5 games, UX, Mobile Web) 
• The entire Android Website: http://developer.android.com 
• Material Design docs from http://google.com/design 
• Web Fundamentals documentation from http://developers.google.com/web 
• The Google Cloud Platform docs from https://developers.google.com/cloud 
• Android, Cloud, and Design videos from the Google Developers YouTube channel 

In total, the content amounts to over 30GB worth which is easy to see why this could be an issue in internet-starved countries. Google says it has already distributed over 2,000 of these kits through Google Developer Groups in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Bangladesh. 

All of the included content has been released under the Creative Commons and Apache licenses; which means it can be shared however you like in order to help introduce millions more people into the world of programming.

If you’re an organisation or school, you can request a developer kit here. 

What do you think about Google’s offline developer kit? Let us know in the comments.