The point of this blog post is to give my fellow developers a few pointers to sites you can go to learn new skills or improving your old ones.

As web developers we never “finish” our learning, the technology we work with every day is rapidly changing and improving, whether it be our frameworks, libraries or even the programming language we use.

The always-changing part of web development is one of the things that makes me enjoy it so much, there is always something new to learn, always a new framework to look at, a new design pattern to study or a new language to get involved with.

Additionally, having up-to-date skills and knowledge puts you in a powerful position when it comes to being hired, employers and freelance clients likes hiring people that “know their shit”, can adapt to change and can learn new things by themselves.

Therefore, it is important for us to keep learning as things evolve around us.

Video Learning Sites

I personally am mostly a Visual Learner, meaning I learn best from watching tutorials and embarking on video courses.

What I enjoy the most is to learn new things while watching someone else build “something” in the technology, framework or language I am interested in learning, a great course that comes to mind that does this exact thing is JREAM’s CodeIgniter Course, I am quite a fan of his videos and courses, as he explains things really well and makes things easy to grasp.

In addition to JREAM’s video courses here are a few of my favorite video course streaming sites aimed at programming and web development:

PluralSight

PluralSight is a great place to get video courses on various technology, programming is a big piece of the pie, but you can also embark on a journey through various Microsoft, VMWare, and various other technologies, certifications and SysAdmin type courses.

Furthermore PluralSight has recently purchased Digital-Tutors and Code School, the first one being a video course site for game art and design the latter being a “learn by doing” interactive programming course site.

This means that if you purchase a subscription to PluralSight, you instantly get access to all their other sites as well.

A subscription to PluralSight costs $29/Month or $299/yr.

Tuts+

The Tuts+ network has increased drastically in the past year, providing free written tutorials, paid courses and a marketplace platform for web developers, designers and musicians to sell their products.

I have mostly used the Tuts+ Premium service to learn, They have a few good courses on PHP, more specifically OOP PHP, Design Patterns and Testing.

Tus+ Premium has courses on a lot of programming languages and web design, most notably: Ruby, PHP, Python, .NET and JavaScript ( + various JS libraries and frameworks ).

A subscription to Tuts+ Premium costs $15/Month

LaraCasts

You can’t really mention Tuts+ without including the name Jeffrey Way in the same sentence, he is a content creator at Envato and the owner of LaraCasts, which is a Video Course site dedicated to PHP and Laravel which in case you didn’t know is a new and popular PHP Framework.

Jeffrey is an excellent tutor which has his own way of explaining things that make them very easy to understand for beginners and experts alike, I

A subscription to LaraCasts is going to run you $9/Month.

Udemy

Udemy is a platform where course creators can create and monitize their own video courses.

Now, for this reason, I am going to warn you to stay critical, in certain categories udemy is plagued with low-quality courses that were put on there purely for generating money.

You should always read the reviews, check the ratings and watch the previews before putting any money into a course on Udemy.

Other than that, this site is a great site to use when learning a new technology, programming language or framework.

Udemy also has an Affiliate program that you could sign up for to generate a little bit of money for yourself for referring your colleagues or friends.

If you want to take a course on there, but it’s just a little bit more expensive than you’d like, put it in your wishlist and you can go back to it whenever there is a sale or you get more funds.

Udemy’s prices varies based on the what the course creator chooses to charge, there is often sales on Udemy that give you 50% off or more on various courses.

Others

I know about other sites that you might be interested in checking out.

Thanks for reading

I hope that you have discovered something new that will help you further your skills and knowledge to become a better developer.

If you know of any other sites that feature similar content, be sure to leave a comment about them below.

Knowledge is Power.