Lynda.com online training library

For those of you not familiar with Lynda.com, I suggest you check it out to see if these tutorials may be of any help to you. Lynda Weinman co-founded lynda.com with husband Bruce Heavin in 1995. The California-based company began specializing in self-paced digital media and design training. Lynda.com's products include an online library subscription, books and CD-roms which can also be purchased individually or in bundles.

The Good
The training is provided primarily through online video courses. I've taken the online courses and they are great. You can start as basic as you like or move to the advanced course. Each tutorial uses audio/video multimedia approach, with an instructor explaining lessons broken down by chapters of each course. There are also class files that are based of the practice exercises the instructor is using in each video. The instructors are experts in their fields of study and usually are lively and entertaining. The video format lets you stop, restart or rewind and review them at your convenience.

The Bad
The courses are subscription based so they are only available to you if you have one. You have to be online to view the course library, you cannot download the videos or you have the option to pay for the DVD formats for off line viewing which can be expensive. An individual title ranges from $50-$150. The educational discount is only available if the instructor sets up an account and limits the titles available. The base cost is $25 dollars a month which excludes the use of the exercise files. If you have questions, customer service can help but there is no live instructor for feedback.

The Ugly
If you do the math, $25 for 12 months is $300. The annual price for the base subscription is $250, so for those of you whom can only afford to purchase monthly, it'll end up costing you! The premium annual price of $375 gives you unlimited access to titles and download able exercise files, pricey from a student's perspective. Again, the student discount of $15 dollars per month can only be utilized if an instructor sets up the account.


I am a fan
Personally, these tutorials have helped me understand the basic use and underlying concepts for multimedia tools such as Adobe's web premium suite. The tutorials encompass the use on both a Mac and PC as well as offer tutorials about operating systems like Leopard and Vista. There is even a video tutorial title for using the Google blogger which I just noticed as I was writing this and may blog about this title at another time. They offer older software tutorials so if you are employed by a company and know nothing about an outdated software that they use, these titles are a good recommendation. The library ranges from Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple to themes like animation, design principles, web development and networking/security. The customer service was also quality from my experience, I had a small billing problem with my account and in a quick phone call it was easily straightened out.

Take a moment to look at their free previews and you may just find something of interest. I know of students and teachers alike that have both used, encourage and have benefited from lynda.com