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It's quite terrible, I mean, amazing for Lynda :) Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer? It's a sinkin

It's quite terrible, I mean, amazing for Lynda :) Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer? It's a sinking ship. The 'one-stop for all your learning needs' is simply a bad model - all programmers know this. You have to go and seek out different resources that work for you and now we CAN, more than ever. The only reason to choose Lynda is out of ignorance or laziness. Both of which are indicators of somebody you don't want to hire! LinkedIn's head must be operating in oldschool mode of certificates actually meaning something. They don't. Unless they're HARD to get, really hard. And if they are, then you are better off going to a real college/university where you can get realtime feedback and support. What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly...

cleaver 12y ago
I would see Lynda as being more valuable for specific software packages like Adobe Illustrator. Videos teaching programming don't really fit my learning model. I really need to build and tweak to learn. A walkthrough like on video seems better suited to software packages.
kleer001 12y ago
> what has Lynda got to offer? Lots of practical vocational skills that fill in the gaps of an academic track. > What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Depends on how diverse said programmer would like to be. Maybe there's a tidbit about being a real estate broker or plumber or data-entry drone that some working programmer re-maps to a problem they've been chewing on for months. My $0.02: Being open to new experiences and having an always-on learning POV goes a long way to fertilize success.
puranjay 12y ago
Exactly. Take is as someone who has been teaching himself how to code, Lynda, Codecademy, even Udacity are not going to cut it. These are good if you want to play at coding. But if you want to do anything serious, you'll have to check out actual lecture videos and books. For example, I was trying to figure out linked lists and the best resources were either from solo Youtubers, or a couple of videos uploaded by MIT and IIT (in India)
- rada 12y ago
  There are currently 5 linked list tutorials on Lynda.com: http://www.lynda.com/search?q=linked+list http://www.lynda.com/search?q=linked+list
kaitai 12y ago
I take statistical mechanics classes for fun on Coursera. I learn what Powerpoint buttons to push to make an animation from Lynda. I do not ever in my life want to spend ten weeks listening to lectures about Powerpoint. I want to get my Powerpoint crap done as fast as possible, and Lynda is pretty useful for those job skills.
rosser 12y ago
> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly... The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes. I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.
- alexashka 12y ago
  "Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer?" I'm not saying people shouldn't learn. I'm saying there are superior alternatives for every area Lynda is offering to teach. Not sure whose point of view you're disagreeing with really.
  - unreal37 12y ago
    Lynda.com currently makes a $150 million per year in revenue. With all those free sources you mention, how are they doing that? Why are companies paying for education for their employees? People pay for education. People will continue to pay for good education, forever. Education will never ever be free, because it has value. Oh you can pick up some Ruby on Rails skills with a manual and some free tutorials. Not really what we're talking about here though.
    - vtlynch 12y ago
      This comment is a gem. Its not good. But its a gem.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - KaoruAoiShiho 12y ago
      Really shortsighted to think of the value as in the cash extracted from the student. The real value is that more people are educated. Ways that an educator can see the cash from that created value are various. They can make job referrals, they can do credentialing signaling, they can do ads, they can sell premium tools while providing free education on how the use the tools. So yeah, education can be free, should be free, and will be free (and in most cases are already free if you consider public schooling).
Throwaway90283 12y ago
I didn't know how to write a line of PHP or MySQL (previously a frontend designer/developer). I went through a couple of the courses on Lynda because I had an idea for a project I wanted to develop. I started writing backend code for the project within a week of starting the Lynda tutorials to practice what I was learning. The project started gaining traction and users a couple of weeks after that, and I quit my job a year later. Today, it generates about 70k a year in passive income. Lynda brought me from not knowing how to declare a variable, to being able to develop a simple site with a database, user registration, commenting, administrative pages, etc, in a very short period of time. It's a great resource to hit the ground running in a week. However, like you said, you then need to to grow using other resources to learn how to sprint.
- alexashka 12y ago
  That's great, what's the website?

cleaver 12y ago

I would see Lynda as being more valuable for specific software packages like Adobe Illustrator. Videos teaching programming don't really fit my learning model. I really need to build and tweak to learn. A walkthrough like on video seems better suited to software packages.

kleer001 12y ago

> what has Lynda got to offer? Lots of practical vocational skills that fill in the gaps of an academic track. > What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Depends on how diverse said programmer would like to be. Maybe there's a tidbit about being a real estate broker or plumber or data-entry drone that some working programmer re-maps to a problem they've been chewing on for months. My $0.02: Being open to new experiences and having an always-on learning POV goes a long way to fertilize success.

puranjay 12y ago

Exactly. Take is as someone who has been teaching himself how to code, Lynda, Codecademy, even Udacity are not going to cut it. These are good if you want to play at coding. But if you want to do anything serious, you'll have to check out actual lecture videos and books. For example, I was trying to figure out linked lists and the best resources were either from solo Youtubers, or a couple of videos uploaded by MIT and IIT (in India)

rada 12y ago
There are currently 5 linked list tutorials on Lynda.com: http://www.lynda.com/search?q=linked+list http://www.lynda.com/search?q=linked+list

kaitai 12y ago

I take statistical mechanics classes for fun on Coursera. I learn what Powerpoint buttons to push to make an animation from Lynda. I do not ever in my life want to spend ten weeks listening to lectures about Powerpoint. I want to get my Powerpoint crap done as fast as possible, and Lynda is pretty useful for those job skills.

rosser 12y ago

> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly... The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes. I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.

alexashka 12y ago
"Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer?" I'm not saying people shouldn't learn. I'm saying there are superior alternatives for every area Lynda is offering to teach. Not sure whose point of view you're disagreeing with really.
- unreal37 12y ago
  Lynda.com currently makes a $150 million per year in revenue. With all those free sources you mention, how are they doing that? Why are companies paying for education for their employees? People pay for education. People will continue to pay for good education, forever. Education will never ever be free, because it has value. Oh you can pick up some Ruby on Rails skills with a manual and some free tutorials. Not really what we're talking about here though.
  - vtlynch 12y ago
    This comment is a gem. Its not good. But its a gem.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - KaoruAoiShiho 12y ago
    Really shortsighted to think of the value as in the cash extracted from the student. The real value is that more people are educated. Ways that an educator can see the cash from that created value are various. They can make job referrals, they can do credentialing signaling, they can do ads, they can sell premium tools while providing free education on how the use the tools. So yeah, education can be free, should be free, and will be free (and in most cases are already free if you consider public schooling).

Throwaway90283 12y ago

I didn't know how to write a line of PHP or MySQL (previously a frontend designer/developer). I went through a couple of the courses on Lynda because I had an idea for a project I wanted to develop. I started writing backend code for the project within a week of starting the Lynda tutorials to practice what I was learning. The project started gaining traction and users a couple of weeks after that, and I quit my job a year later. Today, it generates about 70k a year in passive income. Lynda brought me from not knowing how to declare a variable, to being able to develop a simple site with a database, user registration, commenting, administrative pages, etc, in a very short period of time. It's a great resource to hit the ground running in a week. However, like you said, you then need to to grow using other resources to learn how to sprint.

alexashka 12y ago
That's great, what's the website?