I'm a bit of a Lenovo fanboy for their sleek miniscule designs and budget builds, so I'm just going to be posting Lenovo laptops.
If you don't care about screen resolution, the Y40 is an extremely strong option for such a cheap price. (Get this if you're going to be processing a lot of information. or something like rendering a video.)
The Y40 Specs at a glance are
14" Screen
i7 processor (Really unrequired if you ask me)
R9 M275 (A complete powerhouse and a truck for a laptop)
8GB RAM
5400 RPM HDD (You might want to consider replacing this)
If you want a big resolution and couldn't care too much about performance, the Z70 is a 17" laptop with pretty good specs for the price it is. (I'd reccomend this over the Y40 if you don't care too much about gaming and/or doing more than 3 tasks at most. This is the laptop I use to code on the go and has been working amazing me for the past year. I do get a couple of lag spikes when running around 10~ tasks at once, but that's to be expected.)
The Z70 Specs at a glance are
17" Screen
i5 processor (For what you're doing, this is all you're really going to need)
Intel HD 5500 (I found this to be useful for watching at 1080p with no visual loss. No pixels had to be cut either, so I could watch HD flawlessly.)
5400 RPM HDD (Again, you might want to replace this.)
8GB RAM