[alexashka]

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...

[rosser]

> 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]

"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.

[freshhawk]

Those are of very different types. Where is the practical photoshop retouching course from MIT or Stanford?

Of course there isn't one, because that's not the kind of education they provide.

Where are the superior alternatives for someone to learn how to process HDR images in Photoshop or How to use Rhino to render architectural designs? And they need to learn this by tomorrow.

[alexashka]

Here is what google gave me in 0.31 seconds for photoshop retouching: https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...

Smashing magazine 70 free resources? Sounds good.

Let's go down the list, HDR images in Photopshop: google gave me https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...

The first link seems quite in depth and adequate.

Do I need to go on? I'm not trying to be a dick but the first two examples I gave you took less than a minute to find FREE answers for.

Even if you do find some edge case where Lynda happens to have a better solution than what I can gather online within 5 minutes, what does that prove?

Lynda can't match MIT or Stanford, or Apple's developer resources. Instead of pivoting, they're selling what's available freely, for money, to those who are incompetent at using the internet.

That's their business model. If you think that's ok and worth 1.5 billion, great, we simply have a different outlook on life.

[rosser]

No, their business model is (among other things) curated online courses — yes, for money; it is a "business model", after all.

Without looking, I can't say definitively, but I'd bet an appreciable number of the Photoshop tutorials found in your (probably also unverified) LMGTFY-fu are poorly written, inaccurate, inspecific as to which version of Photoshop they're teaching or otherwise suffer from quality control issues — and probably more than one, at that.

I've also never taken an Lynda.com course, myself, so I can't speak directly to the quality of their offerings. A number of former co-workers work there [1], however, and if they're any indicator of the caliber of people the company employs, then they're probably pretty solid.

They're selling a (presumably somewhat reliable) minimum level of quality in the courses they put up, so that people who have better things to do than perform comparative analyses of the free offerings out there [2] can get on with the thing they wanted to do in the first place: learn the material they're interested in learning.

I don't think that's a particularly terrible business model at all — especially if you can also flip it for $1.5b.

[1] Congrats to them, and I hope their options agreement included accelerated vestiture upon acquisition!

[2] A thing that might be rather difficult, given their desire to learn about the subject in the first place. How, exactly, do you know which course or tutorial is worth a damn if you don't know anything about its subject matter? I guess you could pay someone to do it...

Oh, wait.

EDIT: Footnotes instead of parentheticals for legibility.

EDIT 2: Please don't call people whose priorities and skillsets differ from yours "incompetent". It smacks of the kind of elitism I find so disgusting in our industry, and of the myopia I was referring to up-thread: "Well, if I can do this, everyone should be able to!"

[unreal37]

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.

[KaoruAoiShiho]

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).

[cmurf]

I'm curious what your position is on the value of air, and how much it should cost rather than how much it does cost. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learning-curve/a...

[vtlynch]

This comment is a gem. Its not good. But its a gem.

[mason240]

Why would people not interested in technology want to learn programming?

[rosser]

Lynda offers courses in many things besides programming.

[cleaver]

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.

[kaitai]

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.

[kleer001]

> 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.

[Throwaway90283]

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]

That's great, what's the website?

[puranjay]

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]

There are currently 5 linked list tutorials on Lynda.com:

http://www.lynda.com/search?q=linked+list