Learning online

Almost two weeks since the last post, too much time! But it has not been only my fault (playing for example Rome Total War II), it has been because in my free time I've been learning online.

There are three main sources of knowledge that are taking my free time, two for developing and one for languages. The ones for developing are where I'm spending most of my time because represents what I need to do now and what I want to do in the future. The language source is part of hobby and part of long-term plans for my life, but I think better explain that in order:

First I want to introduce you iTunes U, a really really big repository of knowledge that you can access from your iTunes for free. There you can find lots of different courses about different topics: history, science and, of course, development. My favorite one is the University of Stanford course about developing in iOS 7 (that you can find here). I've tried to learn iOS developing with a couple of books, but only with this course I've been able to understand the basics. In every class there are a slides presentation and at the second half a practical example, everything explained in a comprehensive way easy to understand by a non-english speaker. In addition here you can find the whole collection of podcasts made by Mike Duncan about the history of Rome that as a lover of ancient history I found a perfect mix of entertainmentand culture, give it a try!

The second knowledge source is CodeSchool that is not only a series of videos and slides like iTunesU, but there are 'code labs' to practice every part of the lesson you've done. There are various topics (all related to developing) like Ruby, Rails, CSS, javascript, JQuery... It has gamification so you earn badges and points when you are advancing in the different courses. You REALLY learn here but the sand part is that's not free, but it's only 27$ per month so it's not expensive.

And finally the last one. Since the first time I was in Germany I loved the country and Berlin over all, My wife and I have plans to go to live abroad in the future and as Germany is a good place to go I started to learn german on my own. Needless to say that without a teacher is a hard language to learn but I make it for fun so it's ok for me. One website that I use often to improve my german is Deutsche Welle where you can find lots of exercises and theory to improve your language knowledge.

So, that's all for today, I hope that you find those website as useful as I do.