For some reason, I've found that there's a dearth of free typing practice programs on the internet. I am not even a programmer, so I don't need to train the numbers all that well or anything. I'm just looking for a realistic and straightforward typing practice site or program.

I'm down to earth about this: I know that the only way to improve this skill is patient daily practice over the course of weeks, there is no quick fix or anything. Does anyone know of a good, free site about this? I'm not really sure what I want. It could possibly be just information or it could be an actual interactive program. Thanks for any advice.

Type Racer lets you channel your competitive edge into improved typing skills from realistic sentences.

What exactly do you expect from a program that a word processor and a web-browser can't offer?

Why waste time typing stuff that is of no use to you and gets dumped at the end of your session? Spend time writing something, anything, and you'll improve over time.

Just keep typing... I've been a chicken pecker.. a damn fast one. But in the last year, I've actual gotten alot faster and started to notice that I don't look at the keyboard 90% of the time. Though I've also notice my typing tends to be dyslexic, I don't know how many times I've type 'fro' 'retrun' and 'ifnfed'. Seriously though, just type, and over time you'll get better at it. I't not worth spending money on.

What really made me a good typist is instant messaging programs. I was the nerd who always typed whole words and used correct punctuation, and often complete sentences too. There's always the time pressure to get your comment written in time, before the thread of the conversation moves on. But I agree with Luckless. Typing isn't about transcription, it's about getting the right key-presses to feel natural. You can do that with copying typing exercises, but it's easier if you let your thoughts flow into the keys.

I'm already a fairly fast typer, and I don't look at the keyboard at all when typing. I'm just looking for a way to get much faster than the average, as much for the novelty as the practicality. Thanks anyways guys.

I sixth the opinion that to become a better typist, you should mostly just keep typing. That said, I do recommend learning the "official" touch typing method of putting your fingers on the home row and so on. I'm doubtful whether it really increased my typing speed - I didn't make a before/after comparison for myself - but it significantly reduced the amount of movement of my fingers. This has reduced the stress on my hands quite a lot. I've been quite happy with the program TIPP10 to learn this. Take a work week in which you are not under a tight deadline pressure, do the first lessons in this program, and then force yourself to use its system for everything else that you write on a keyboard, and I mean everything. It should only take you few days to be able to use the new system without frustration, and at most a few weeks to regain your old typing speed.

Curious side note: If you take the definition of touch typing from Wikipedia literally, you can be a touch typist without using this "official" system. I suspect there are many good programmers who intuitively learned their own system and know it from muscle memory. By that definition, they are touch typists

Type Racer lets you channel your competitive edge into improved typing skills from realistic sentences.

I was going to say that the reason there aren't many is because type racer is better than what anyone else would do so nobody tries to make a new one