Have you ever been looking for a place to improve your knowledge in a certain technology? Have you ever been looking for a platform providing videos in incredible good quality, never seen before? You can stop searching, there is an answer called Pluralsight. In the following article I’ll show you how you can benefit from this opportunity and what you have to do to get access to over 400 courses.
Introduction
Pluralsight is a video platform with over 200’000 users, founded in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard, Fritz Onion and Keith Brown. The brilliant thing about Pluralsight is the quality concept behind its idea. The videos are produced in a professional manner in high quality resolution. Further, the authors are all not just specialists, but experts in the particular field they’re talking about and have a sense for didactic. Only experts have a chance to be considered as an author.
Courses
The available courses contain several modules which include one or more parts. Most courses have a duration between two and four hours, but there are also longer and shorter courses. All courses are categorized and have a level from the following list: Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced.
Categories
Pluralsight covers many different topics from .NET, C#, WPF, Android, Java, Architecture, HTML, CSS, Entity Framework, JavaScript, jQuery, NHibernate to soft skills. The entire category list can be accessed directly on Pluralsight.
What do I mean by soft skills? I want to answer this question by a course recommendation. A few weeks ago I watched the course called Career and Survival Strategies for Software Developers. It’s definitely one of the best courses I’ve ever taken up to now. Professional software development is not only about coding, it’s more!
Community
The community rates courses and gives feedback to the authors of the courses. This way there is a continuous improvement of the existing and the new courses. If you have any questions to a specific course, you can be sure to get an answer in time. Otherwise you can ask your question on Twitter.
Price plans
There are plans for individuals and businesses. From my view it would be best for a software developing company to use the business model. This way the licence is not allocated to a specific employee.
Basic
29$ per month or 299$ a year, includes:
- access to the entire course library online via web and mobile apps
Plus
49$ per month or 499$ a year, includes:
- access to the entire course library online via web and mobile apps
- access to exercise files and assessments
- certificates and offline viewing
Free Trial
If you don’t believe all the glory already said, go for a free trial. You have the chance to get full access to all available courses for ten days. Within these days you’re able to watch 200 minutes for free. After this period you should be able to decide quickly if you want to subscribe for a further month or a year.
Investment
As announced earlier this year, Pluralsight has raised $27.5 million to produce further courses and improve the platform itself.
Clarification
In order that you know how to weight my statements, I have to declare that I’m not related with Pluralsight in any form. These statements are all mine and I decided to write them down because of my enthusiasm for Pluralsight.
Conclusion
If you haven’t got a subscription, try the free trial to be sure that you don’t need a subscription. Or in other words, I am pretty sure you will be amazed about the experience you get, once you tried it.
I’m sure it’s worth the 29$ per month. It’s a very cheap price if you consider how many courses you’re able to access. Don’t forget the courses which will be release during your subscription. They’re also included in that fee. I promise you’ll be able to learn a lot more in less time. This saves you time which is money in turn, isn’t it?!
At the moment I don’t have a Pluralsight subscription, because I have to prepare for some really important exams, but I’ll renew it for sure if they haven’t given me one for free ;-).
I’m currently using them. Great site.