As mentioned in my last post, I'm taking advantage of this arbitrary point in the Earth's rotation around Sol as a starting point for a renewed spring of educational self-improvement. Since then I've been looking into what online courses to take advantage of. Below are some of my impressions, both old and new, of some of the online learning resources I've dabbled with.
Linux Academy As an employee of Linode, I have free access to the courses available on LinuxAcademy.com. This is a great perk, and one I should be taking full advantage of. One of the features I like about their service is the Learning Plans. This may be just the tool I need to help keep me on track.
Unlike Code Academy below, I very much like the ability to jump around a course, potentially skipping ahead of information I already know about.
Code Academy I see a theme developing... I decided to start my reintroduction to Code Academy by picking up their Make A Website course. It's been a good long while since I got my feet wet with HTML, and my CSS knowledge has always been spotty at best.
This was a mistake. I quickly lost interest when I discovered I couldn't skip lessons. That meant that not only did I have to sit through each explanation of a <p> and a <div> tag, but I had to replicate it in their mock console before it would let me continue.
If you're new to the scene and starting from scratch (and need repetition to drive home a lesson) then this might be the method for you. But It's not for me.
As I get more experience with these and other online courses, I'll update this post, create a new one, or possibly move to a static page. I already have some thoughts on a few other sites, but it's been long enough that I should give them another go before I weigh in.