Few days ago a friend of mine asked me about how to learn 10 finger touch typing. I could recall how I learnt it myself and that there was a cool software helping me out. It was free and I had a lot of fun using it. After a short research I stumbled upon it: Tipp10 type tutor. And here we go, it was still alive and is continuously developed. Still open source, it now serves Win, Mac and Linux users and even an online version exists.
I can really recommend Tipp10. It is clearly arranged and doesn’t need any further explanations. You can type training lessons, free lessons (even a C++ example class for future programmers) or your own created lessons. There are great statistics about your learning improvements and the error types you make sorted after the concrete finger or sign/key. To learn the 10 finger touch typing was more like playing a video game than learning.
Though, the software is not usable in the social science research process and therefore a bit off-topic. Still, in our view it is always beneficial to be able to write fast on a keyboard. Your brain loves thinking and dislikes wasting time on searching the keys…. ;)