Lynda.com—Learning Made Easy

Sometimes you need to learn a piece of software quickly. And sometimes you don’t have time to buy a how-to guide off of Amazon and then spend two weeks learning everything. Once in a while you have to learn something right this instant or not at all. So if you ever come across a deadline you think you’ll never make, let me present a very helpful (and easy) solution called Lynda.com.

Lynda.com is an online training library that offers in-depth training videos (in Quicktime format no less) for numerous applications from a wide variety of vendors. Here is a brief list of some of the products they have tutorials for:

Vendors and their products
1. Adobe - Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, etc.
2. Apple - OS X, iLife, Final Cut Pro, etc.
3. Corel - Painter, WordPerfect, etc.
4. Macromedia - Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, etc.
5. Microsoft - Access, Excel, Word, etc.

Techniques and skills
1. Creating animation
2. Design principles
3. Learning digital photography
4. Network and security
5. Podcasting

Web development
1. ASP
2. Cold Fusion
3. Javascript
4. Perl
5. PHP
6. CSS
7. XML

So now that you have an idea of what types of things they can teach you (and this isn’t close to being a complete list) the next question is, how much? Well, if you only need a small bit of instruction you can pay $25 per month (or $300 per year) and have access to their entire video library. However, any associated practice files that go with those movies are not included.

If you decide to subscribe for an entire year then it will only cost you $250 instead of $300. However, once again, you don’t get the practice files. Now, if you think you are a fast enough learner, then you can get away without using the practice files. However, if you are learning something completely new and feel you want as much help as possible, then look to the next and final option.

For $375 yearly, you can have access to all of the videos and all of the downloadable content. The only other way to get the example files is to purchase the CD version of each tutorial. That option is perhaps best if you need only one or two tutorials and need to use them multiple times (for training large groups perhaps). Otherwise I would suggest sticking with the online offerings.

The main downside to this service is that while the videos can be watched online, they cannot be downloaded. Also, you can only view one movie at a time. Yet, despite these minor drawbacks this is a solid service well worth your time. For those of you who need someone to actually show you how to use an application, this is for you.