IRC was the best online course you could have had back in early 2000s, provided you could come up with the right questions, read the right books and did your own research first.
Do you mean you read a book and then asked people when you got stuck?
In my experience yeah. And even still in the past decade. People on IRC want to sharpen their chops and keep their skills fresh, and if you’re respectful and doing most of the learning in your own, they’ll usually be glad to give feedback or suggestions, or even help you understand difficult topics. It’s mutually beneficial to all involved, even lurkers can benefit a lot from it. Hugely underrated resource. I’m not sure if the same culture is there in slack though, but plenty of people still use IRC to socialize and learn and teach.
The problem is; you could listen to two half hour videos on templates and still get stuck on a simple problem like how to use a templated member type or how/where to define a templated member function.