Mario Carrion
Updated: January 16, 2021 Video added
Historically the way I like learning new things is either by reading, attending conferences/seminars or watching videos and then by doing something practical and concrete using what I learned from whatever media I consumed. I’ve never been subscribed to any service in the past, however in the recent months I’ve been trying a few different things for learning more and essentially for catching up with whatever tech is trending.
I bought a few courses on Udemy but then I realized that buying courses wasn’t going to be cost effective in the long term, so after browsing for a few alternatives I decided to give O’Reilly Online Training a try, the main reason is the well known quality of their content, I’ve read several books published by O’Reilly in the past and I haven’t been disappointed that much.
The killer feature for me was the being able to watch the Ultimate Go Programming, Second Edition live lesson by Bill Kennedy. I was lucky enough to attend one of his workshops 3 years ago, and watching this updated lesson was really enlightening.
The monthly subscription is $39 and it allows you to access any of the media published by O’Reilly (and others like Manning and Packt), which includes books, seminars, videos of recorded conferences and perhaps my favorite media: live training; you can basically plan weeks ahead what you’re planning to learn, attend the live training and really get your money back after a few days.
If your commute takes a while, like mine, you may want to download an app for your mobile device so you can read and watch the content offline, however be aware of the reading capabilities of this app (at least the iOS version), which are weak compared to their Kindle counter part, watching videos offline works as expected though.
In the end I think if you like reading and learning from different topics, not only technical, you should be able to make good use of this subscription, reading 2-3 books and attending 5+ live seminars a month is money well spent.