Depends on what kind of coding you are interested in and what your workflow is like.

If you are a new web developer it could be worth it, if you are looking into other non-web programming sublime or atom are probably the better choices because there are a lot of plugins and they support a bunch of different languages.

Coda's idea is a one window workflow, complete with webkit / FTP / Git / terminal built in. Most of my days using Coda I spent simply using it as an editor. Its a philosophical standpoint that really depends on workflow. Its integrated FTP operations are fantastic.

When I changed jobs, and started working for a company with much better work flows (and required more complex tech stacks), I ended up jumping to Sublime + Tower, and just using the terminal separately. On the blue-moon that I need a FTP, I fire up Transmit. Since I'm working off local hosts, then pushing my commits to Git repositories that are then served to Jenkins, (staging/beta builds vs production) I'm now never touching the server itself.

Coda is geared best for someone looking for a one app solution to a multitude of things. I think like many, I started with Coda and outgrew it and that's fine. Its a great place to start and does a good job of being accessible. Panic is renowned for its UI/Design and Coda certainly shows that.

I've still yet to fully embrace the nuances of Sublime Text even after a year of using it as my primary editor. Sublime is not a pleasant experience to configure.

So to summarize, Coda is a great place to start.

Personal taste. I tried an older version of Coda and instead bought http://www.macrabbit.com/espresso/ because it felt more in tune with my style, and because it came with the wonderful CSSEdit. But Panic makes great products, several of which I've bought. Transmit is cooler than an FTP client has a right to be.

I have both, Sublime seems to be leaner, but Coda has some neat features. If you are new to programming I would personally use Sublime since it is free, and then decide from there after a month or so.

I'd suggest trying out their trial version (I think they still have that) to see if you like it. I used to use Coda, then Coda 2, but moved onto Sublime Text and haven't looked back. I still fire it up occasionally, but ST is my go-to editor.

Depends how you like to code. One is a text editor with an optional fee of $70 the other is more like an IDE for web development. Both are powerful and useful tools. For most people I think it's just personal preference.

I prefer Sublime, but Coda has better support for accessing remote locations (via FTP, sFTP, etc). With ST2, you need a third party plugin to do this and I found it a bit awkward to use.

IMO it might not be worth to spend that kind of money on something like this if you don't know what you want from it yet, which you don't seem to. Maybe you can find some free editor/IDE, or a free version of such? Then maybe you can choose what to purchase (if anything) once you know what you want.