Online learning platforms that accompanied my journey
Even though I may have taken a formal education to move into a more technical role, there are many other types of knowledge and skill-set that had to be obtained and self-learn. I did spent plenty of hours on these platforms, partially was to make it worth my money and also to be more hands-on rather than having theoretical class knowledge in the university programme.
Some of my friends had also asked whether there are any interesting online courses that they can go and learn, especially when it relates to coding or analytics. I personally took the paid versions online because I felt it provided me so much resources that was good for learning even till today. I will be giving my few cents’ worth on the platforms that helped for my work as well as my master course. It is not any form of promotion but a sharing of how I self-learn my coding.
There are many other paid courses such as Udemy, Skillshare and PluralSight but the ones that I paid for are these three websites:
- www.teamtreehouse.com
- www.lynda.com
- www.safaribooksonline.com
These websites serve different purposes for me and I felt it might be good to share depending on your needs to learn technical or other types of knowledge. The third(safaribooksonline) is my favourite because of the thousands of resources available which I will elaborate later. All three have basic versions and pro versions as well. I only took pro versions for lynda and safaribooksonline which I feel their resources are more valuable to me. Let’s dive slightly deeper into the three websites I used over the last two years.
TeamTreehouse
The image above is what you will see when you first sign up for the basic package. The interface is quite pleasing and I can say they did a very good work of making it friendly for users. For those who are just getting started with coding at the very basic level, I highly recommend this as a starter. It is super user friendly and it enforces a lot of concepts while learning. This platform utilizes gamification as a way to motivate users to keep viewing the videos and practice tutorials to improve their coding.
Gamification — “The application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.”
As you can see from the headers, there are essentially 2 tabs that you will usually go to. Normally, I will start off with the tracks where they build a very systematic and robust curriculum depending on what you want to achieve from this platform.
As you can see I did complete quite a number of modules while I was using the platform. For example, If you are interested in mastering the full-stack foundation, meaning from backend coding to front coding(in this case using javascript), you can click on the track and they will have a list of modules for you to complete. It will further breakdown the topics into smaller portions such as below.
The reason I chose this platform as part of my personal learning and development is because they split the modules into videos that are digest-able for anyone. Most video is between 3–6 minutes long and it comes with objectives and quizzes to test your knowledge. It is a bite-sized style of learning which will not give you a huge headache when you are consuming the knowledge.
If you look at the library, these are the various topics that are available for you to learn when you enroll for this course. I have not much comments on the techdegree because I did not intend to take it as I already had my masters course but from its reviews, it is meant to provide better learning opportunities as there will be assignments and live teaching from the programme.
I guess the benefits about this platform is makes you feel like you are playing a game and there is sense of satisfaction for completing each module. All these videos are self-made with their own animation and analogies which makes coding concepts very easy to comprehend. Over the past year, I spent an hour almost everyday to watch these tutorials and perform the quizzes and objectives. It will be a great learning experience especially for beginners. For quizzes and objectives that you do not know to answer, you are able to ask for help in the treehouse community by posing your questions. You can also gain points if you contribute in answering the questions as well.
There are a few drawbacks to this platform while learning such as:
- If you are looking for more complex materials, it might not be a good place.
- Topics covered are more suited for software development or web development
- As it is broken down into smaller pieces, you may not get as much exposure when dealing with the entire stack or bigger projects
Lynda.com
I really love this website because it provides a huge variety of videos. It not only covers coding and data analytics, it offers creative courses like video-editing, music production, calligraphy and so on. The current homepage of lynda looks like something as below. It has good interface and the videos are easy to view. For this, I enrolled in the pro version because it provides exercise file
The viewing of the video will look like the image as below where the instructor will do a demonstration or explain the concepts to you in the video. Exercise files are provided for some courses so that you can download it and practise with it. Normally, in the exercise files you will have a version that you can start from scratch and a completed version so that you can refer to if you encountered any problems while practising. For some videos, there are quizzes as well but they are only exist in multiple choices.
Lynda also provides many learning paths which is simply amazing. It has so many topics and you will not get bored because you can something different like for example music production. Your viewership is also being tracked so that they will continue where you left off too.
As lynda is part of Linkedin, you can upload your achievements on Linkedin or any social media whenever you complete a module. I didn’t share as many because I have been completing a lot of modules and it will probably flood my news feed. Overall, I think the materials are great and their content is always being refreshed which helps to keep up to date with the fast-moving technology.
O’REILLY (safaribooksonline.com)
This website is by far my favourite and my highly used platform because it contains a lot of resources that I need for my self-learning. It has a variety of books, videos and live training. It has similar format as lynda in terms of learning paths. However, I feel the library of books and videos they offered is so huge that it suits everyone from beginner to advanced. I would say this is highly suited for people who are ready to take their knowledge to the next level.
The newest added feature would be the live online training in which varies from 3 hours to 3 days of lectures. It is very beneficial for many users who attend the training live because you can interact and pose questions to the instructors. They will be happy to answer your questions. If you are worried about missing the lectures, do not worry because every live training is recorded and you can review it later. You will just be missing out the interaction portion.
The selections in the platform to me are pretty amazing because it has tutorials that are complex enough for you to perform a full-stack project. For users who are beyond beginners, this website has better resources for you to refer and look at. In fact, when you enroll to some onsite courses, the instructors will also recommend books that comes from this publisher. Having access to all the resources online will definitely benefit you as individual because you will have the information whenever you need it. I took a pro version of this because it provides gives you access to their resources such as the codes and exercise files. It is far valuable to me as who is very keen to practise my coding and development skills.
The platform looks very similar like lynda as well but I enjoy the content because it has a lot of sophisticated content.
Conclusion
These are my main three platforms excluding Udacity, Coursera, Udemy and Youtube. The subscription to these three platforms has greatly value add my learning especially during my master course journey and personal development. I chose O’Reilly website as my favourite because it was my first platform that I used and I am already impressed by the sheer number of contents available for reading and viewing. Some textbooks such as SAS, advanced machine learning, Tableau etc greatly adds my more knowledge to my current skill-set arsenal.
Ultimately, I believe each has their own learning pace and preference. I highly recommend teamtreehouse for beginners who wants to embark coding for the very first time. If you want to get a feel of these platforms, they provide trial version of about 2 weeks before they prompt you to become a paying customer. Feel free to try it out first and understand which platforms suit you best before subscribing to any. Thanks for reading and happy learning!
