Please don't be a jerk on HN, especially in response to someone else's work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you telling me that this HN entry is anything more then an ad? I know an ad when I see one. Yahoo is full of them disguised as articles. And I kinda stopped reading yahoo exactly because of click-bait articles disguised as ads. So guess what was my reaction when I seen this one. I really hope HN doesn't go the same path.

I think courses and books are super valuable.

For example, I've been building a new web app with Elixir and Phoenix for the last few weeks, learning as I go. Couple hours a day (when I can basically). Did nothing but skim the docs and look at open source examples.

I got pretty far and made real progress but the other day I decided to just buy the Programming Phoenix 1.4 book which is written by the people who made Elixir and Phoenix.

I'm now 80% done with the book and I'm very happy I bought it. It filled in SO many gaps and I have a ton of actionable "TODOs" in my app to make changes based on what I learned in the book. Some of these are really big wins and the insights learned help me understand how to write better code in the future (even outside of Elixir).

When it comes to courses, I can't speak for OP but I personally offer free life time updates and support (I happen to create courses too, but not on SQL). Having a get out of jail free card where you can ask someone a question and get an answer is worth the course's price alone. Especially considering if you were to hire someone for that level of support you would probably end up paying 3 or 4 times the cost of the entire course just for 1 hour's worth of support.

    >  ...instead of just learn it on your own on postgresql.org...

The world is full of people who "learned things on their own" and still created nightmares.

The important thing is to just do it, accept failures, apply some self-criticism and keep going. How you get started is far less important in terms of quality of output as time progresses in one's career.

Courses are a perfectly good way to jump-start the process as is learning from source materials. Different things work for different people.

Or you just retire someday and these people take over maintaining all your codebases. Hopefully they're as successful at spotting the unsupportable assumptions in your code as I was at finding them in your comment.

This seem based on the assumption that the "real learner" who RTFM will somehow end up with deeper knowledge than someone who pays less than one billable hour for a well-written course. I've found many times when I don't do a good overview, I end up with gaps in my knowledge because I merely learned "just enough".

Learning syntax is one thing, learning to write good code is another thing, and learning community best practices and advanced techniques is yet another thing. You can be a competent Java programmer without ever reading a book like "Effective Java", but reading that book will probably improve your skills. The same is true for PGSQL (or any other language). Sure, you can pick it up on your own, but mastery is achieved with experience and education.

Not quite sure what you mean is this a positive comment or a passive aggressive negative one.

I still contented the £2K (back in the day) that my employer spent on a week long intro to Oracle was a good investment for them and Me.

It's definitely a positive comment. 100% positive for me.

As for how my employer at the time pointed me toward SQL was something like; "Here is yahoo.com, learn SybaseSQL by Monday on your own, you start a new project on Monday that requires it". It was Friday afternoon, in 1998 and Google was still in it's infancy, hence all searches were done via yahoo or altavista. And I had to learn it by myself over the week-end. Not even a £0.02 investment from my boss.

I am also an avid self learner but a good teacher / course it's inestimable. Just watch a course like linear algebra from MIT with Gilbert strand and compare it to studying it alone. The difference is enormous .

The biggest problem with learning on an "as-needed" basis: You only learn what's needed to accomplish your immediate goals. An inefficient, injectable query will certainly get data showing up on your web page.

Most people are not going to "learn databases" over the weekend. A boss or company that has employees capable of this type of independent learning and routinely expects it will soon lose the former. That costs more than 2 cents.

In 1998 I learned a lot on my own as well. I love the fact that today there are better resources when I need to learn new topics.

Was there any useful content on Sybase, searchable via Yahoo, in 1998?

Sure, links to Amazon books about Sybase, for way more than $50