The Learning Journey Never Ends

Ever wanted to learn something but you didn't know where you could learn it and have access to it everywhere even when driving with the public transport? I have checked out a few nice platforms to learn things. And wrote about how I experienced them.

Udemy

Udemy is a platform where you can buy professional courses (sometimes even with 90% discount) and do them by watching videos where the content is explained to you. Some courses also give you tasks to do and make learning check for you to check if you have learned and understood the content. You also have the possibility to contact the course creators and ask questions. Some courses are updated occasionally to give you the current information on the topic without paying additional fees.

I have used Udemy for a few things already and they offer a wide variety of courses for tons of different topics. I was impressed how you literally were able to find courses for about anything you could imagine to learn. With Udemy I properly learned the basics of using the 3D modeling application Blender. Each course had different sections and the course I worked through for learning Blender was generally done with explaining to you the things first and then having to do a task to use what you have learned. Some lectures even included additional material or prepared material you had to use to finish the task. I went on Udemy daily and did a few lectures after work everyday and learning the basics of Blender with Udemy was a good experience.

Pluralsight

Pluralsight is really similar to Udemy and also offers courses as a collection of stream able videos. But unlike Udemy Pluralsight is focused on IT stuff. Additional cool things it contains are learning paths, some which were even prepared by the vendor of the thing you try to learn. For example currently I'm learning for the AZ-900 (Microsoft Azure Fundamentals) exam. The learning path is a collection of courses selected by Microsoft to give you the information you need to learn for the AZ-900 exam. I must say I really appreciate that there are good learning paths on Pluralsight. Additionally you even have the chance to take an exam like the AZ-900 for yourself on Pluralsigh to check if you know enough to answer the mock exam.

Learning on Pluralsight was also a great experience. Taking the learning path and learning the needed knowledge for the AZ-900 exam with different courses by different people was actually pretty good. And the changing between the educators didn't disturb as I though it might at the beginning. I also did some SkillIQs where I had to answer questions on the technology and afterward saw how good I did in comparison with other people who did the SkillIQ. I like the SkillIQ tests since I thought it was interesting how to see how much I knew in comparison with other people on the different technologies I used.

If there is one thing I didn't like as much it was that in the SkillIQ tests that you had no chance to get a very good result if you answer the first few questions wrong and then answer the rest right. Since the test gives you easier questions when you answer wrong and answering wrong to much on the first few questions doesn't allow you to get back to the tricky questions even if you answer everything correct. But at the same time if you answer the first few questions correct you get even trickier questions. And if you answer like about 50% of them wrong you might get still a better result even.

Overall however for learning IT specific topics I would say Pluralsight is great.

O'Reilly

O'Reilly is a publisher and a platform with tons of books. The books can also be bought in book stores for learning but with the O'Reilly platform you have access to them all online. So if you learn better or prefer books to learn then O'Reilly is probably a good start if you want to learn with books. O'Reilly offers you also learning paths which tell you which chapters of different books you can read to learn something with a combination of books. I think this is actually a good idea. However I haven't had time to check out O'Reilly yet so there isn't much to say about O'Reilly from me right now. But it is definitely a good platform to learn with books. O'Reilly is also IT oriented.

Conclusion

So I introduced a few good learning platforms in this post and have to say that all of them are good and recommended. There are obviously still other ways to learn things like by directly buying the book you need or using tutorials on YouTube or on a Website if you want to learn something for free. But if you want to learn something with professional content then using these platforms or buying books is definitely a better choice.

I hope I was able to give a nice quick overview of the different platforms and the experiences I had with them.

Interesting Links

Udemy

Pluralsight

O'Reilly