5 ms·

IMHO 3 months of hard work on Pluralsight courses can give one more practical programming skills than any 3 year Bachelor degree in CS. Debugging, CRUD, somewha

IMHO 3 months of hard work on Pluralsight courses can give one more practical programming skills than any 3 year Bachelor degree in CS. Debugging, CRUD, somewhat new JS/mobile frameworks are what the majority of software developers need to know for their 9 to 5 job.

lukasm 12y ago
I highly doubt that any online service has an order of magnitude better performance than a uni.
- wehadfun 12y ago
  I think for specific new techs pluralsight will beat a university. Univerity are not going to teach you how to use d3.js
  - joshpadnick 12y ago
    This is essentially the "Computer Science vs. Programming" debate, although Uni gives some programming experience and Pluralsight gives some computer science. Yevgeniy Brikman maintains a great blog and wrote about this[1]. [1] http://brikis98.blogspot.com/2014/05/dont-learn-to-code-learn-to-think.html http://brikis98.blogspot.com/2014/05/dont-learn-to-code-lear...
- rational-future 12y ago
  Unis lack professors with the practical knowledge of Pluralsight instructors and they are centered on areas like math and algorithms, that are fun, but not of much use for somebody building an enterprise CRUD site or mobile app. Knowing your IDE, the best way to accomplish a task in a given framework, how to work around limitations of tools and protocols IMHO is something unis don't teach much, while very important for the average Joe developer.
- csomar 12y ago
  Define "a uni." I think the parent argument is very flawed because he is comparing a specific entity to universities (which varies in quality really a LOT)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
JeremyMorgan 12y ago
I agree, as long as you throw in some practical experience building things. Not to discredit universities, but much of the content is theory because the existing model simply cannot keep up with advancing technology. Core CS theory is great and essential but it won't help you in everyday life as a coder like actual application will. On the other hand you could argue that a programmer get enough CS theory from Pluralsight courses to become decent, or even great, but that piece of paper is still pretty important to many folks out there.

lukasm 12y ago

I highly doubt that any online service has an order of magnitude better performance than a uni.

wehadfun 12y ago
I think for specific new techs pluralsight will beat a university. Univerity are not going to teach you how to use d3.js
- joshpadnick 12y ago
  This is essentially the "Computer Science vs. Programming" debate, although Uni gives some programming experience and Pluralsight gives some computer science. Yevgeniy Brikman maintains a great blog and wrote about this[1]. [1] http://brikis98.blogspot.com/2014/05/dont-learn-to-code-learn-to-think.html http://brikis98.blogspot.com/2014/05/dont-learn-to-code-lear...
rational-future 12y ago
Unis lack professors with the practical knowledge of Pluralsight instructors and they are centered on areas like math and algorithms, that are fun, but not of much use for somebody building an enterprise CRUD site or mobile app. Knowing your IDE, the best way to accomplish a task in a given framework, how to work around limitations of tools and protocols IMHO is something unis don't teach much, while very important for the average Joe developer.
csomar 12y ago
Define "a uni." I think the parent argument is very flawed because he is comparing a specific entity to universities (which varies in quality really a LOT)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

JeremyMorgan 12y ago

I agree, as long as you throw in some practical experience building things. Not to discredit universities, but much of the content is theory because the existing model simply cannot keep up with advancing technology. Core CS theory is great and essential but it won't help you in everyday life as a coder like actual application will. On the other hand you could argue that a programmer get enough CS theory from Pluralsight courses to become decent, or even great, but that piece of paper is still pretty important to many folks out there.