When the Georgetown University Law Center offered computer programming last year, it was an experiment, a single class for about 20 students. It was filled almost instantly, and the waitlist swelled to 130. This semester, the law school has five programming classes, and the waitlist still overflowed.

“They aren’t going to become programmers, but they realize these are skills that will make them better lawyers,” said Paul Ohm, the Georgetown law professor who teaches the course. His students, for example, learn to write short, tailored programs that can identify clusters of words and concepts in Supreme Court rulings more accurately than a Google search or standard legal software.

It’s the same in every field, from marketing to manufacturing to medicine. Code, it seems, is the lingua franca of the modern economy.

So you have no plans to become a computer engineer, no dreams of being code wizard at Google or Facebook. But you’ve decided it’s time to pick up practical technology knowledge and skills, including writing some code. There are options aplenty, in college classes, online courses and boot camps. The offerings range widely in terms of time required, skills mastered and price tag, from free to more than $20,000 for some six-month programs.