The idea was to find the best YouTube crash courses for every "hot" tech skill. "Best" is subjective, so I had to rely on video popularity, viewer feedback, and my own watch experience to gauge how effective each one is.
This is for folks that:
- Want to quickly refresh their skills
- Want a preview of a technical topic before investing lots of time and money into it
- Have an interview in 30 minutes and desperately need something, anything
The goal is to get people hooked on a subject - give them a basic overview of what's going on, then lure them in with increasingly more complicated tutorials.
All possible thanks to the YouTube instructors who are kind enough to put up amazing content for free.
The plan is to have a feedback mechanism that will let the viewers decide if a video should stay or go.
Where possible, attention is called to the credentials of the instructor (much more important and impressive than the credentials of the curator). The first few minutes of the videos are usually enough to convince a viewer that it's a serious video intended to convey information.
- Run the search
- Click through the top 5-10 results
- Investigate which courses are a) complete (i.e. not just pitches for an upsell), b) up to date, c) presented clearly and succinctly
I did all that already for each topic.
Another big question people have: "Where do I begin learning X?" They inevitably get linked to a giant roadmap diagram. On this site, the videos are arranged in a particular order - starting from the very beginning.