I’m a homebody anyway and never want to leave the house. Now I have a valid excuse for not leaving the house. Feeding toxic and unhealthy behaviors? Yes. Is right now the time to care? Probably not. Queue bingeing 12 hours a day of Udemy courses.

Almost upvote, then Udemy 😢

@SortOfTested Could you emphasize? If there’s something wrong with them I’d definitely wanna know before I spend any more money :P

@lettiebear
Where to begin

- Udemy is noted for review exploitation, so the rating system is unreliable
- The majority of videos are quite literally just reading the docs to you
- A fair amount of the content that isn't reading docs is plagiarized, poorly
- None of the material is fact checked or peer reviewed, so you get as much hot sports opinion as fact
- Udemy assumes no liability for the content, so if a DMCA is file on a course you purchased, there is a risk they will delist it and you'll be out whatever money you spent. That's why they structured their business model as a "marketplace" rather than an "e-learning provider."
- Few of the videos deal with first principles, so you're left with an assemblage of problem:solution sets to memorize, which is extremely low value.

In general, video is the slowest consumption medium. You cover material faster going through docs and examples, as well as books. Always learn from first principles, you'll never go wrong and you'll be able to build intuition about what you're doing.

@SortOfTested all that is true in general, but there are a few good courses on Udemy, like Ben Tristem's gamedev and 3D courses. They've actually put effort into it and if you do it the way the videos go (with regular practical challenges) you'll learn a lot.

@SortOfTested I like to think that it provides me with a guideline but in no way do I believe the “With this course and this course only, you’ll go from zero knowledge about computers to a senior developer!” trope. I typically go through the lessons and then supplement with additional resources, usually MDN, Medium articles, and FCC exercises. But for those of us who don’t have it in the cards to get formal schooling in CS, I think it provides a good curriculum outline to follow, and even compiling additional resources to supplement your learning in some cases.

@lettiebear
You can definitely learn all of CS without formal schooling. There's not much you get in University aside from access to equipment that isn't readily available otherwise. Would definitely be a better use of the time.

I'm not sure what not in the cards means, but the knowledge is out there and available.