
Ask HN: Have you ever bought an eBook or mini course? - sharemywin
Curious what was it about? home much did you pay?
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giantg2
Let me just start by saying I tend to be cheap and I don't really read fiction
anymore.

I don't buy eBooks. I prefer real books if it's a subject that requires 250 or
more pages. Part of this might be that I'm tired of staring at screens at work
all day or that I want a physical asset for my money. Under 250, I think I can
find all the information I need through internet sources like articles,
forums, blogs, etc. I once used a free eBook to learn C#.

I'm not sure what constitutes a mini course. I have done free coursera
courses. I also paid about $30 for a practice AWS test set on Whizlabs.

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Adrig
I bought a few non fiction ebooks and Udemy courses and always found value in
them. Never paid more than 30£ for one, tho.

Especially satisfied with Udemy : I heard a lot of "everything is on youtube,
google the rest" but having a structured course really helped me get into
programming. For 10$ (wait for the weekly "sales", that's the real price) you
have access to a great educator who can afford to invest more time into his
lessons than a youtuber or in a medium post.

Unfortunately I can't seems to find valuable ebooks or courses for more
advanced topics...

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sloaken
A few years ago it seemed like every tech book I was interested in was in
Kindle Unlimited. One price, hard to beat. The first year I was happy. Year
two seemed like almost nothing was on kindle unlimited. This third year,
literally NOTHING I want is on kindle unlimited. Needless to say, no more good
money after bad.

I have paid for like 3 classes, each under $20. Two I was happy with one I
felt a bit cheated.

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striker_axel
I do buy ebooks for my kindle. Mostly fiction books bcz reading a technical
book is difficult in kindle. Though it sucks that I can only read those ebooks
in Amazon kindle platforms but kindle is good for bedtime reading. Also, I
have purchased some courses from Udemy almost 12 but I never got to finish any
of them. Some of the courses are great but others are boring hell.

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JoeDaDude
I bought several mini courses on Udemy. The Udemy SECRET: wishlist a course
and wait for Udemy to have a sale. I got the Complete iOS and Swift Bootcamp
[1] for $11.99.

[1] [https://www.udemy.com/course/ios-13-app-development-
bootcamp...](https://www.udemy.com/course/ios-13-app-development-bootcamp/)

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strongbond
Totally a fan of Udemy (at sale-price). I find their star points sytem a very
reliable indicator of quality and have become a real fan of several of their
featured instructors (among whom are Andrew Mead, Stephen Grider and Jonas
Schmedtmann). Node.js stuff, React, Webpack, Mongo etc. More advanced stuff is
a little sparse, to be fair.

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DrNuke
The trade-off is simple to me (both as a reader and more recently as a
provider): it is time vs money. How long would you need to collect, organize
and present the material you are buying? Any well conceived eBook or mini
course you need is so cheap compared to its cost, in that sense.

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CM30
I bought a few web development ebooks from Smashing Magazine in the past, as
well as a game design book about Wario Land 4.

That's about it though.

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mtmail
Web design. I think the screenshots and examples in the ebook (PDF) were of
higher quality than in a print version.

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sharemywin
I'm generally turn off by the idea of paying for content but I know sometimes
people do. kinda like clicking on adwords.

