I wanted to take a moment to tout an online training portal, www.Lynda.com, for their low-cost, excellent eLearning material. Lynda.com catalogs hundreds of software training courses, and they are often the first to offer training material for the newest software on the market. For example, Lynda.com released a complete training program for Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) the same week that the product was released to the public (October 13, 2008).
Lynda.com, though not a free service, is very affordable.
- Monthly = $25 per month for access to all courses (no contract; month-to-month)
- Annual = $250 per year for access to all courses (20% discount off monthly price)
- Premium = $375 per year for access to all courses and all downloadable exercise files
Listen to any of the Lynda.com promotional podcasts for free or watch any of the Lynda.com promotional videos on YouTube, and use the code at the end of the podcast or video to get a free 24-hour pass to the complete Lynda.com catalog. (Understand that these podcasts and videos are promotional and are not intended to represent complete courses.) Here’s one of the more recent podcasts / videos that discusses the new Photoshop and Illustrator features in Adobe CS4.
Lynda.com | Photoshop CS4 & Illustrator CS4 New Features
And here’s a little “secret.” I successfully used a $50 discount code on the Annual membership. Discount Code = ug200otl
A complete list of the current offerings from Lynda.com (as of October 22, 2008) can be found here, but be aware that they add new courses to their catalog every month.
The team at Lynda.com welcomes training requests. They will be glad to tell you if a particular product is in the pipeline. According to Lynda.com customer service: “Your input helps us decide what titles to produce next.”
I’d like to hear testimonials from those of you who have used Lynda.com. How does it compare to other training services you have used? If you haven’t used Lynda.com, do you have recommendations for other training portals that are similar?
[...] If you’re interested, there is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that is gaining in popularity. (In fact, free alternatives to all the expensive software you use is gaining in popularity. Chances are, you can probably find a free version of anything and everything you need.) It is called OpenOffice. Although it is free, you will need to invest time to learn the new interfaces of the OpenOffice applications. (http://Lynda.com is a great resource for learning OpenOffice and other applications … $25 per month, no contract. I blogged about Lynda.com here.) [...]
By: The Good Life » Blog Archive » My Software Tools on November 13, 2008
at 1:30 pm