Rant: Paid $50 for a "beginner" coding course and it was a total waste

Everyone keeps saying you need to pay for structured learning to get anywhere with coding. So I dropped $50 on a Udemy course for Python, and honestly it was just a guy reading slides in a monotone voice for 8 hours. The free tutorials on YouTube from channels like CS Dojo taught me way more in half the time. Has anyone else found that cheaper or free resources actually work better than these paid courses?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_henry8d ago

Oh man, "just a guy reading slides in a monotone voice" - that's exactly what I ran into with a paid PHP course a few years back. I learned way more from free YouTube playlists from people like Traversy Media and just building dumb little projects on my own (a to-do list app, a weather checker, stuff like that). The $50 courses always feel like they're checking boxes for content, not actually teaching you how to think through problems or debug stuff when things break. What really clicked for me was finding a free open source project on GitHub, trying to add a tiny feature to it, and then Googling every single error message I got along the way.

lisa_jones217d ago

Did your buddy ever try one of those code bootcamps, or was he stuck in the same YouTube rabbit hole as you? Honestly, I had a friend do the same thing, got a $400 course and ended up quitting after a week because he just felt like he was copying slides into a notebook.