Down at DevWeek 2013, I was given a card for one month on Pluralsight; they do video courses for all manner of programming and technology courses. 

I activated it this weekend, and drank from the firehose. I’ve gone through several courses in a really short time. In that time, I’ve also been able to cut some working code in the new tech, and shore up some existing knowledge. Here’s what I’ve figured out;

• Sometimes, video is much faster to absorb than books. If you learn that way, give them a look.
• The courses are comprehensive. By that I mean that I feel more ‘armed’ than than the ‘thirty minutes of tutorials and short how-to videos’ approach to learning. In that, they are like a book.
• They seem to have courses for every buzzword; 3 on node.js, 5 on nosql, 2 on OData, 16 on Azure. And loads on the staples; 33 on SQL Server, 28 on JavaScript,  12 on iOS, 38 on ASP.NET. And 73 on SharePoint (shudder. It must need a lot of explaining…)

I’ve stuck in my credit card details because I think I’m going to benefit greatly. 

I know this is a terribly positive review. I’m not affiliated in any way.

5 thoughts on “Pluralsight – a short review”

1. David Ashman says:
   October 16, 2013 at 1:35 pm

   From a complete rookie’s (newbie, beginner) perspective, what do you think about the service?

   I am looking at learning to code in Visual Studio, mainly MVC4 and got recommend by a great developer to jump into c# first at least. What do you think are my chances of learning by using Pluralsight?

   About me:
   I have some experience and I like code. I can understand code, some javascript, I know HTML and CSS and a bit of PHP. Lay out for me, please. Hopeless case? Or 5000 hours away from coding something decent?

   Happy with any inputs. Thanks!

   Reply
   • Steve Cooper says:
     October 16, 2013 at 2:43 pm

     Hi, David.

     I think if you’ve got a bit of JavaScript, and you like what you’ve done so far, then that’s a great start. And ASP.NET MVC 4 is a really good platform to go for, I think. It’s one of the most popular and not the kind of thing that’ll make your brain pop out of your ears

     I think if I were in your situation, I’d sign up for pluralsight — the free trial gives you 200 minutes, which is enough to watch this course; C# from scratch at 3hr 11m. Go through it one video at a time, and practice each bit for yourself to get the knowledge ‘burned in’ to your brain.

     If you enjoy that, either sign up for the paid stuff, or start looking at some of the free resources out there. If you’ve got some JS and PHP, you should be fine. You can get a free edition of Visual Studio 2012 so you don’t need to spend any money.

     Here’s a couple of MSDN tutorials on ASP.NET MVC that might be appropriate once you’ve got the basics of C# under your belt;

     MVC Music Store — written in MVC4 and shows you all the pieces.
     Intro to ASP.NET MVC 3 — written in MVC 3 (the latest version is 4) but there’s not enough of a difference to worry about at this stage.

     Reply
     • David Ashman says:
       October 16, 2013 at 3:12 pm

       Hi Steve!

       Thanks for taking your time answering my “noob” questions. But I think your advise is very sound. My major concern was if it at all was possible to learn to become a “good develope”r, from beginner to good, with the help of Pluralsight.

       I have BizSpark but haven’t downloaded all of the software yet. As you suggested I downloaded Visual Studio Free last year and have played around a bit together with a great developer, but I feel completely stupid. I understand some of the Model View Controller concept, but I never know what to write as I don’t know C#. It seems to be really great with Intellisense and the Install library which name I have forgotten, but as I said I don’t really know how to get everything to work together.

       I was hoping that through putting in a lot of hours with Pluralsight, I could go from scratch to ok/good in a decent short time span. In an effort to maximize time spent learning to code.

     • Steve Cooper says:
       October 19, 2013 at 6:50 am

       Hi, David,

       Well, I can’t guarantee anything, but if you only took out a single month’s subscription you could bombard yourself in good stuff and learn how to throw together all the pieces, I would say.

       I think what you’re looking to do is very possible. Good luck!

2. فیلم آموزشی says:
   June 28, 2014 at 6:11 pm

   Pluralsight is great and focused on it field

   Reply