
Ask HN: Whats your opinion on online courses? - Hornsking
There are a lot online learning course websites like: Udemy, edX, Coursera or similar.
I&#x27;d be interested whats your take on them. Do you think you can gain useful hard skills if someone is a beginner&#x2F;intermediate or even on an expert level?
Maybe you already did such courses yourself and have experiences you want to share.<p>If you have other sources for getting started in cyber security topics like: 
cryptography, pen testing, ethical hacking or basically anything else I&#x27;m happy for your recommendations.<p>A note on the background of my Question:
I want to gain new skills specifically in the IT-Infrastructure&#x2F;Cyber Security field.
It&#x27;s not about money, mainly i want to challenge myself and I&#x27;m very interested in Cyber-Security since I work as IT-Admin and want to broaden my skillset, because every time I stop learning I feel like getting behind in the IT-Sector and I hardly have time for a university education, even though it is an Option.<p>Thanks a lot guys.
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davismwfl
The courses will vary with the instruction and how much effort you put into
them, just like most university courses do. I don't think you will go wrong if
you want to learn more, even a so-so course will bring up topics you may not
have thought about and you can challenge yourself. I obviously like the best
courses I can find, but I have sometimes learned the most from courses that
were not rated as high by others. Given the costs are relatively modest for
most of these style courses, I think you'd do well to try any of them that fit
your area of interest and have decent reviews.

Also if you are interested in security there are conferences dedicated to it
nearly year round, and they generally offer pre/post conference training and
specialized information. That is obviously the more expensive option usually,
but my guess is given you are already experienced you'll get a lot out of
these sessions.

I'd say university is really not worthwhile, unless you just want/need to add
a degree to your title.

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Hornsking
Thanks.

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eswat
Their efficacy depends on your learning style. I personally get bored pretty
easily with lecture-style learning, even through an online course. I need more
experiential learning. So with cybersecurity I’m picking it up through:

\- Study guides and practice exams for certificates (that I may or may not
get). This is probably the critical thing I do because it sets a track of what
kind of material I should be focusing on for the subseqent learning tools.

\- Anki/spaced-repetition to remember things like acronyms

\- Quick YouTube talks (specifically those not in a webinar format; usually
bad production quality and a lot of padding not related to the topic)

\- Games to put theory into practice (CTFs, bug bounties, video games that are
very abstracted from real hacking but still require exercising logic)

\- Podcasts that look at the industry from different perspectives. Currently
listen to CyberWork, which has a lot of fluff but I offset that with Darknet
Diaries which does a great job of storytelling.

\- Trying to explain these concepts in layman's terms to others

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Hornsking
Interesting, do you have sources for some interesting study guides? I will
take a look at CyberWork too.

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rc-1140
Pluralsight is probably the only online learning website that I've used that
actually caters to varying skill levels and has some kind of quality filter
(there are still courses I've taken that aren't great, but there appears to
actually be one in contrast to the ones you've listed). Have had usually good
experiences with Pluralsight, it's gotten me up to speed on a _lot_ in a
relatively short time.

I don't know anything more than I picked up via osmosis about IT and nothing
about cybersecurity, but it looks like they've got a decent catalog of
cybersecurity courses.

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teddyuk
I find pluralsight pretty infuriating - the speed the presenters talk is
really slow and they keep repeating the same thing, it typically goes:

    
    
      - hi, i am going to talk about something
      - in the next section we will talk about that thing
      - in this section we are now going to talk about that thing
      - talk about that thing
      - we just talked about that thing
      - in the last section we talked about that thing
      - earlier, we talked about a thing
    

It might have got better in the year or so I last used it, I gave up because
of this.

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ranc1d
Well with regards to speaking slow I guess that is to suit non-native
speakers, however there is always the playback speed button which can be
increased to a speed that suits

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PaulHoule
As somebody who has taught college physics and also home-schooled a child in
math, I think that doing lots of problems is the most important way to learn.

With my son I used Kahn Academy as the curriculum. He did not get a lot out of
the lectures, so I had to explain the content, but having the problem sets was
highly valuable and was proof that he was making progress.

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atsaloli
For learning infrastructure, specifically Linux system administration, my
recommendations: [http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/training-program-to-
make-a-...](http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/training-program-to-make-a-
novice-system-administrator/)

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Hornsking
Thanks for the link, much appreciated!

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atsaloli
Yay, you are welcome!

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Hornsking
Already diving in. Refreshing to use linux after 4-5 years of windows hell
post-school.

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atsaloli
Great! Enjoy! :)

I'd love to hear your feedback or any suggestions for improving the roadmap.

