"I for one would immediately discard a software developer as less than worth his salt if he felt he needed any sort of paid tuition to pick up new technologies.

"I for one would immediately discard a software developer as less than worth his salt if he felt he needed any sort of paid tuition to pick up new technologies. If you're not learning something new practically every week, you're probably not a good coder." - from a comment on the linked article. Different people learn in different ways. I actually learn better from books than from lecture type courses; unfortunately, there are always bits of information that slip between the cracks in writing. I have been teaching myself to use linux and programming in my spare time for years and I all too often have to waste a lot of time in trial and error because some minor detail that the expert writing the book thought was "too obvious" to include explicitly.