Everything you want to know!

It is astonishing how many free online courses one can take. This is one of the things I love about the internet. You can get so many information for free. 

The only problem with that is finding the good ones, because there is so many material out there. You have to be very critical and skeptical when reading something and you shouldn't take everything for granted and cross check things. 

The other problem is to motivate oneself to do it. If you pay for example for a language lecture than you will go to it, because you already paid 300 €. But if it is a free online course, what does it matter, if you work now or later or whenever? So you really need to be motivated to do it. If not, you may better be off with the paid version, as strange as it sounds.

At the moment I am taking a free online course to get the basics of French. It is offered by the local library (so you have to be a member) and online for 3 month. So this is my motivation, as I know the time is limited :). I tried some time ago to learn via book and a CD, but I was so often unsure of the pronunciation. In the online course they talk more and they also correct my pronunciation. After that I think it is easier to go on with the book-CD-version. So sometimes you can combine the online and offline ways to learn.

Regarding programming there are a lot of scripts, web pages even videos out there. An interesting link I recently discovered is "Udacity" that offers free online university classes mainly related to advanced programming like building a search engine, web application engineering or applied cryptography. I think I will subscribe to one of the courses after finishing the language course, because I also find these topics very fascinating. If I do, I will give a feedback here of course.

So, what are you waiting for, everything you want to know is out there!