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

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

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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.

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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.

How is plularsight compared to something like Coursera or Udemy?

Coursera and Udemy are not subscription based.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

Do you feel that Safari Books Online is still going strong since being acquired by O'Reilly Media? I heard something about big layoffs last year. I'm pretty excited about trying it out but also wondering if it will be a stable learning resource well into the future.

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