

Pluralsight raises $135M to expand online learning for professionals - richards
http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/27/pluralsight-grabs-135m-to-expand-online-learning-for-professionals/

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scrabble
Signed up for Pluralsight this month, and I'm getting a fair amount of value
from it so far, but I don't feel like that value is going to be a straight
line over time.

I feel pretty confident that it's going to decline as I consume more material
of interest to me and less material that I'm interested is created
simultaneously.

At $29 / month it's a good value for me now, but in a couple of months I'm
pretty sure I'm going to drop my membership until something comes a long that
I must watch. (This time Hanselman and Conery's Art of Public Speaking got me
to sign up.)

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rational-future
IMHO 3 months of hard work on Pluralsight courses can give one more practical
programming skills than any 3 year Bachelor degree in CS. Debugging, CRUD,
somewhat new JS/mobile frameworks are what the majority of software developers
need to know for their 9 to 5 job.

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lukasm
I highly doubt that any online service has an order of magnitude better
performance than a uni.

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wehadfun
I think for specific new techs pluralsight will beat a university. Univerity
are not going to teach you how to use d3.js

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joshpadnick
This is essentially the "Computer Science vs. Programming" debate, although
Uni gives some programming experience and Pluralsight gives some computer
science. Yevgeniy Brikman maintains a great blog and wrote about this[1].

[1] [http://brikis98.blogspot.com/2014/05/dont-learn-to-code-
lear...](http://brikis98.blogspot.com/2014/05/dont-learn-to-code-learn-to-
think.html)

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JeremyMorgan
This is fantastic news. Of all the sites I've tried within a similar vein,
Pluralsight is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest. I will still go back and
hit a book for certain topics but if you want to get up and running fast it's
unbeatable.

Plus you can take courses in a series (say from beginner to advanced) and it
feels like one large course even if it's different authors.

I know it has it's detractors but I love this site and it's worth every penny
for me.

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joshpadnick
Sites like Safari Books Online and Pluralsight have transformed the way I
learn new technologies and techniques. That being said, I find myself getting
3x or 4x the value out of Safari Books Online.

Something about those Pluralsight videos makes it harder for me to extract
piecemeal knowledge, versus finding the relevant content in a book. Still for
$29/month it's an unbelievable value.

My only other issue is I feel their beta site makes it harder to find courses
and is a step backward. Hopefully they'll remedy that.

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rational-future
Hmmm that's interesting. Almost any study I've seen implies that the most
efficient way of learning is see-do. I think what makes Pluralsight and
similar training videos work for me is having multiple big monitors (3x 27'')
with the training video, IDE and browser easily visible at any time.

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joshpadnick
I hear you on that. I guess Pluralsight is like a "course on demand" and
requires an hour or more of sit-down time, whereas Safari is really "ad hoc
learning".

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andrewsavikas
As Tim said, Safari is actually _both_ (2000+ on-demand video courses _plus_
all the books and a bunch of conference videos). And in our usage data, we see
most people do both things -- short "ad hoc" learning, especially during the
work day, with longer sessions of activity, both in video and books, in the
evenings. The trend is especially pronounced with mobile devices, as mobile
usage peaks on the weekend and includes a much longer average session length
than we see on the desktop.

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tatqx
Around 6 months back, when there were hardly any books on AngularJS and
related JavaScript technologies (Jasmine, Karma, etc), I was got a running
start on my project after going through several courses on AngularJS and
JavaScript on Pluralsight. Writing a book takes way more time than creating a
video tutorial and, I think, in this rapidly developing programming landscape
Pluralsight provides the right edge when it comes to learning new libraries,
frameworks and techniques.

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minusSeven
I had pluralsight membership for a month. Although the materials looks
exhaustive I felt none of them went into great depth. They are good for first
time use and know something in short time but beyond that there is nothing of
value. And there are innumerable websites on the internet that teaches these
stuff for free(maybe not all video streaming sites).

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colinbartlett
These are the guys that bought Peepcode right? Those are some fantastic
teaching tools. Glad to see them pushing forward.

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aikah
Nice, Pluralsignt have great courses about concrete products so it's really
fast to pick a tech /language/framework. I however think the production value
is inferior to Lynda.com, especially the sound recording. They should invest
in that.

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curiouscats
Blog from Pluralsight on "Company culture discussions"
[http://culture.pluralsight.com/](http://culture.pluralsight.com/)

I find the blog to be worth reading.

