Ask HN: What is the best online learning subscription for S/W Developers?

28 points by n13 9 years ago | 9 comments

What service or subscription do you use to stay up to date? Do you learn from services like TreeHouse, CodeSchool, EggHead.io, PluralSight, Lynda etc. I would love to hear and learn from your experiences.

nicostouch 9 years ago |

I've only used pluralsight but it's ridiculously good in my opinion. I was asked at work to trial a couple of courses from some providers and in the process was signed up for the pluralsight free trial. The company decided overall it was too expensive, but I was hooked so I bought a subscription with my own money. It has definitely been a tangible boost to my career. I'd be interested to hear others experience of how other providers.

csnewb 9 years ago | |

How is plularsight compared to something like Coursera or Udemy?

ungaro 9 years ago | | |

Coursera and Udemy are not subscription based.

mead5432 9 years ago |

I've used Safari Books, Pluralsight and Egghead.io.

Pluralsight was pretty good. I got a lot out of a number of videos. Since they cover a variety of topics, it was great to spin up on something when I needed it. For instance, I was working with Redis and needed to pick up Lua so I took an hour, watched a video and was on my way. This was about a year ago and their selection around Javascript was a little lacking for the topics I wanted but that has probably changed by now.

Safari Books is fantastic if you like to read. They also have a ton of books on other topics so it makes it a much wider resource depending on your goal. At the time, I was doing quite a bit of "intrapreneurship" so it was nice to grab a book on product development, business and entrepreneurship.

I currently have a subscription to Egghead.io which is way more front-end focused. Around Christmas, they tend to offer a year long subscription for a reduced price which I picked up. The topics don't tend to be as varied as Pluralsight but I think the depth of a lot of them is really good. For instance, I got more out of the Egghead videos around Angular and React than I did from Pluralsight.

jimcsharp 9 years ago | |

Pluralsight got me up and running with StreamInsight so much faster than if I would've had to slog through manual pages and the sparse blogosphere myself. It can be difficult to find content that isn't web related and I'm glad it was there.

eb0la 9 years ago |

Safaribooksonline.

I really like the learning paths based on actual documentation (for instance From Developer to Architect, or From sysadmin to data engineer are very good).

n13 9 years ago | |

Can you please provide examples/info about going from developer to architect learning path?

eb0la 9 years ago | | |

This is the ToC from the developer to architect tutorial (I thought it was a learning path):

Architectural Patterns

    - Design Versus Architectural Patterns,
    - Layered Architecture
    - Event-Driven Architecture
    - Service-Oriented Architecture
    - Microkernel Architecture }

Pitfalls

    - Architecture Anti-Patterns, Part 1
    - Architecture Anti-Patterns, Part 2
    - Tooling and Documentation

Soft Skills

    - Architectural Decisions
    - Architecture Refactoring
    - Meeting Hacks

Continuous Delivery

    - Continuous Delivery Defined
    - Deployment Pipelines
    - DevOps

The "Design Versus Architectural Patterns" section is comes from the book "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture". Other sections are cherry picked from books and videos.

The best part (for me) is that all sections have an estimated time you need to read / watch the content.

Hope this helps