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Just flushed $150 on a 'Python for beginners' Udemy course that was just a guy reading docs out loud
The whole thing was just him copy-pasting from the official Python website with zero real examples, so has anyone else gotten burned by those top-rated courses with fake reviews?
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susan_ward2d ago
Whoa, wait - he actually copy-pasted from the official Python website and called it a course? That's wild. @barbarahill I feel you on the JavaScript scam, I got hit with one where the guy literally just read the table of contents of a textbook. The project-based stuff is where it's at though - I found a free series on YouTube where this dude built a crappy text-based adventure game and accidentally crashed it like three times. Watching him panic and then talk through his debugging process taught me more than any fake-reviewed $150 course ever could. Those polished courses with 5-star ratings are usually the worst offenders.
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jade88514d ago
That project-based approach is the only thing that actually clicked for me too. Found a free series where the guy built a calculator and then a simple game, and he kept running into errors on purpose to show how to fix them. Watching him struggle through a real bug and explain why he did what he did taught me more than any polished lecture ever did. After that I started looking for courses where the description specifically mentioned "troubleshooting" or "debugging" instead of just concepts. Even a messily filmed $12 course on scraping data from a news site got me actually coding on my own within a week. Fake reviews are everywhere but real projects that break and get fixed are worth way more than any slick trailer.
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barbarahill14d ago
Got burned real bad on a "Master JavaScript in 30 Days" course that turned out to be 30 hours of someone reading the MDN docs word for word. What actually worked for me was finding a free YouTube series where the guy built a simple to-do list app from scratch, line by line, explaining why he wrote each bit. After that I started searching for "build a project with X language" instead of "learn X language" and it made a huge difference. Even a cheap $10 course on building a weather app taught me more than any $200 "comprehensive" course ever did. Real code examples that actually break and need fixing are the only way I finally started to get it.
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