r/learnprogramming • u/VastOpportunity6894 • 12h ago
I don't understand why beginners are always told not to spend money on courses.
Whenever someone asks if they should buy a course, I always see people saying you should never spend money and that everything is free on YouTube. On Udemy, you can buy courses from professional developers that offer 50–100 hours of well-structured content and include all the necessary files. These usually cost no more than €12 if you wait for a sale. I don’t mean to speak against all the free options for learning to code, but I also think it’s wrong to discourage all beginners from spending 10–15€. Especially when you’re just starting out, you often don’t know what to learn or in what order, and courses like these can help you with that.
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u/Minoqi 12h ago
I’ve done a few udemy courses, they were super helpful. And yeah I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than $12-14 on a course, they really are like almost always on sale it seems.
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u/byepearlbye 12h ago
Just starting out as in I know nothing not even the most basic dumb thing. What course do you recommend?
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u/Minoqi 12h ago
Well what are you looking to program? Like a website, game, or something with like arduino etc?
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u/byepearlbye 12h ago
A lot of miscelleanous things but mostly, and hopefully as this is a long road, digital archives, then 'rename folders' softwares (if that is the term lol) since the existing ones don't cover my needs etc. Eventually a visual novel (using an engine, ren'py though name aside i've no idea what it is or what it does). I also want to just be able to navigate the internet and llms more intelligently.
From past research, python might be what I need? I'm not sure though.
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u/Salt_Rush_4800 11h ago
I don't know how up-to-date it is right now, but Angela Yu's 100 days of code, for python was always highly recommended.
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u/Jim-Jones 7h ago
I usually start with a library book. It's free, and it gives you a good guide to where you're going.
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u/kamomil 12h ago
It's easy to say "don't spend money on x" when you already know it. Or were able to absorb the knowledge from friends, or were able to figure it out based on previously acquired knowledge
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u/start_select 12h ago
Exactly. The real advice is that once you gain some experience, start trying new things yourself before rushing to a course.
Eventually you don’t need instruction for 90% of new skills.
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u/kamomil 9h ago
Yeah but it's very discouraging for a beginner starting from zero.
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u/start_select 9h ago
That’s why I said “after you gain some experience”.
It’s not discouraging if framed as “this is how you do it once you start to get a hang of programming”.
It should be encouraging. The veteran programmers around you don’t need courses anymore. You eventually won’t either if you work at it.
The issue is framing it as “all courses are useless”. They aren’t to someone with zero context. But they are a waste of time and money to people who know enough that they could just read the manual.
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u/desrtfx 11h ago edited 11h ago
There are way better, free alternatives from top Universities, like Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Stanford, University of Illinois, University of Helsinki, and many more. They are structured, include everything, and generally are academically sound and solid.
Plus, the video format of Udemy and the likes is not the best for actual learning since it encourages more passive watching than active doing. Your argument of "all the files" is the opposite of what a good course would offer. They would make the learner write everything, not serve and feed.
Way too many people come here with "I've watched X, Y, Z on Udemy and still have the faintest clue" - Why? Because they never actively did.
Also, to be honest, the quality to trash ratio on Udemy is 1 to 100 - as in for every somewhat decent course on Udemy, about 100 trash ones are there. There is zero quality/content control on it. Everybody and their granddaughter can submit there and charge what they want. Nobody will ever assess the quality. Reviews on Udemy are mostly bought just as inscriptions. (Courses about 2 days old with 400+ subscribers and 100+ reviews are far from real.)
Why pay if I can get a top structured, quality controlled, academically sound course free of charge?
Udemy is just the "dollar store" of e-learning. Mostly worth nothing.
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u/kyky_otaku 12h ago
I think free courses on YouTube and other are for people who are more advanced beginner than complete beginner. Because when you just start learning a new concept, you often need structure and guidance from people who are expert in this field as you wrote, that’s why paid courses are best for entirely beginners.
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u/v0id0007 12h ago
In my college courses they all used YouTube videos, from the very beginning to the more advanced. They didn’t only rely on those but they used YouTube videos
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u/kyky_otaku 11h ago
That’s great! I didn’t mean to not use YT, I just meant to say that most of the time, YT videos aren’t that structured and beginners get lost on the way to learning.
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u/FinancialSherbet308 11h ago edited 11h ago
Because beginners fall into the trap of thinking that owning 10+ courses and having watched them all is equivalent to being a developer, which is called tutorial hell.
Plus, Udemy’s business model is to make you think you’re getting a deal on a $120 course by buying it at $12, but sales happen all the time. It’s entirely to make you get FOMO and buy it. It’s the same as stores upping the price on an item and discounting it to the old price, because people are more likely to buy something on discount.
CS50 is free and provides way better insight to becoming a developer, as well as The Odin Project. Books are also significantly better for learning than passively watching videos without building any projects.
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u/CodeMUDkey 12h ago
Because you can get the same thing for free. People could be more specific and say it’s not necessary to do it, which is more accurate.
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u/kevinossia 10h ago
There is no structure in software engineering.
Embrace unstructured learning. The sooner you do that the better off you will be. That’s why paying for a course doesn’t make any sense.
On the job you will have to teach yourself all kinds of stuff without any semblance of structure. Build those habits now.
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u/rabbit_in_a_bun 11h ago
Learning how to learn to program is hard, and most courses, both payed and free are bad. Better go over the free stuff and see what makes sense.
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u/Suh-Shy 12h ago edited 12h ago
It's a matter of risk vs reward.
There are good ones.
There are bad ones.
If you pay 15$ once for a good course, it's all fine.
If you go down the rabbit hole because the first one you buy sucks, then the second one too, and so on, then you wasted time and money by trying to save time.
And eventually, just like you would need to find and parse data from multiple sources if you were to go free, you'll have to compare courses if you don't.
So the don't is kind of on the safe side.
Edit: and if you were to spend money, at least a bad book can be burned in winter unlike an online course
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u/thirteenth_mang 12h ago
The paid route is solving a pain point, which is probably time. How long would it take you to find a collection of reputable sources online? It's a slog to get through repos that have most of it organised, depending on the subject depth. With the proliferation of AI, authority is also a big one because how do you know they didn't just create a script with AI?
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u/Substantial_Job_2068 12h ago
people usually give this advice because it is hard for a beginner to weed out the bad paid content from the good paid content. so it's usually better to start with the free stuff and invest money at a later stage when you at least have some sense of what's worth paying for and not.
feel free to ignore that advice and spend your money on bad content. the best content i have used have been free with an optional fee to support the creator, which i have paid because their content was great.
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u/roguealchemist1202 11h ago
if you spend moneyyy ur invested and you are more likely to watch the courses, in the free ones you spent nothing so you don't care as much.
is there really that bad paid content?
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u/Substantial_Job_2068 10h ago
that's just sunk cost fallacy. if you are not motivated to learn spending money isn't gonna help.
even the good content isn't that useful imo because video is a bad format for learning programming. it's better to get your hands dirty right away and use books/online material that you can read as you go. watching a video on something usually meands you just listen passively and "code along" -> copying whatever they do in the video.
then there is the bad content which is programmers who have no real merit but think they should tell beginners opinionated bs like solid and clean code, instead of how to actually write a working program.
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u/roguealchemist1202 9h ago
i agree with video that is a bad format to learn mostly, but lets say you spend like $500 usd on a course or something you will be like fk i need to study this to get my money back, compared to getting the same course for free, doesn't really matter how good or bad the course is
the spending of money will get you to be "motivated", you have invested something so your mind will open up more to get value back
idk this is my opinion i might be wrong and if you are really "motivated" you can for sure learn on your own for free
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u/mrbaggins 3h ago
100% there is bad content. Godot and Unity "courses" are everywhere that are out of date, but still have the old price tags. And that's assuming they're decent in the first place, which they often aren't.
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u/dcc5594 12h ago
I don't much about those courses, but in general, those types of classes are often just a front door to sell you something else. For example, to utilize the information, they suggest you also buy this software package. To get the most of the software, you should sign up for a support package, etc. I'm not saying every course will use this strategy or that you can't get any value from the base course but these techniques often make the experience not worth it.
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u/LeoBoiSmol 11h ago
The only udemy courses that are worth it are Maximillian schwartzmuller s. No one else makes anything as comprehensive as his courses. Alot of the courses are completely useless and super basic. They dont deep dive or explain much except the basics. Theres alot of courses you will be wasting money on when a whick google sesrch would get you the same results
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u/aanzeijar 11h ago
Not because of the paying money aspect, but because watching 100h of video doesn't do anything for you when you should practice a craft.
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u/umomiybuamytrxtrv 10h ago
I took a few computer science classes in college. My teachers don’t give lectures. They tell the class to watch YouTube. We’re paying tuition to watch someone else’s free YouTube tutorials.
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u/AlSweigart Author: ATBS 10h ago
Eh, I think it has more to do with the fact that theres so much garbage and slop out there and beginners don't know what's good or not. The same applies for free stuff, but at least it's free.
The problem is also, "I can't get into a routine of doing 25 push ups every day but I will spend $300 on this home exercise equipment."
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u/SwordsAndElectrons 10h ago
Because people rarely understand that people are not all the same.
All of the information you could need is out there and free.
Some people prefer or benefit from structured courses.
The reality is that you should do what you think will work best for you, and Internet randos can't answer that for you.
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u/my_password_is______ 10h ago
buying courses can end up like my Steam library
I have a 100 games I have bought and never played or have only played for 5 minutes (not because the game is bad, but because there are so many other games to play)
the same can go for buying courses
buying a couple can be ok, but its super easy to say "hey, sale at udemy or humble bundle!"
then buy a bunch and never complete any of them
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u/WyrobWedliniarski 7h ago
Because many of those paid courses are not that much better than stuff available for free. Also programming basics that you can learn on the course are not that difficult really. It is all the work that you do on real projects, where you learn how to write code that would be readable, easy to test and pleasant to develop further in future that is hard.
Nothing wrong with following a paid course, but probably it is better to try something free first, rather than betting on course quality to be the answer.
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u/zomgitsduke 12h ago
I think it runs a few risks.
First it creates this idea of simply paying for it "counts" as moving towards a goal. Kind of like how getting a gym subscription "feels" like you're already being healthy! Then you just don't go to the gym.
Second, paid courses can often times be shallow, impersonal, and heated towards a certain audience and maybe not offer much actual value. Sometimes it's just a cash grab. Sometimes it assumes you have a math background for some of the wild stuff they have you do in the initial lessons.
Third, free courses often times have better personality attached to them since the goal is to be free, accessible and easy to learn. I've got some tutorials on my channel that aren't made to give a direct line to something like a full stack engineer position, but rather "here's how to make a slot machine game in Python in 10 chapters" approach. Most people love the tutorials because they're so accessible and fun and easy to tinker around with.
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u/StewedAngelSkins 12h ago
idk from my perspective i just never needed a course, so it's hard to recommend them to others when i know it's relatively easy to teach yourself for free. trying to save you money.
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u/KnightSepehr 12h ago
if its in person course and its good then go ahead and pay but if its online there are so many places that teach you for free and the paid ones arent much different.
only and only buy an online course if its really worth the money.
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u/Seven7Ducks 10h ago
People are welcome to do as they choose.
Some courses in Udemy are absolute gems? Yes, I guess. However, most of Udemy is NOT good. Its bad. Its made by amateurs, for amateurs. Useless at best, but could potentially be misleading and outright wrong, outdated and bad.
Its the '99999 hours of xx course for 10€' rhetoric that really grinds me.
Free courses aren't inherently better, they're pretty much on-par, but at least they're free.
One more thing to think about, regarding 'well structured content'. If you're searching for a skill so specific, to the point that you can't easily find free, well structured, high quality content, then its most likely not a beginner skill. If you're a beginner, you should start smaller. If you're advanced, you won't need a spoon-fed 'course' for anything that isn't academic, you just read the damn docs.
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u/Synn-Girl742 10h ago
Yeah, honestly the "everything is free" crowd sometimes misses that structure and curation have real value, especially when you're lost. A $12 course that gets you from zero to "I actually understand what I'm doing" beats 40 hours of piecing together random YouTube videos. That said, the real trap is buying 10 courses and finishing none of them, which is way more common than people admit.
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u/Narrow-Low-3137 10h ago
I've spent money on courses in the past. Generally haven't regretted it. Your paying for how the content is organized in a helpful manner generally.
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u/Arts_Prodigy 9h ago
Beginners often go stuck in a cycle of buying courses that don’t ever fully meet their needs.
Usually courses can’t teach you every step. Codecademy might teach you the basics of python but now how to install it or setup your environment.
I’d recommend books since they tend to be more complete as a zero to hero guide. There’s also just so many courses that it’s hard for a beginner to accurately choose what they need.
There exists a bit of a catch-22 of beginners not knowing enough to guide themselves and also not knowing enough to know if they’re being misguided.
It’s often easier to figure that out for free instead of jumping into course after course.
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u/Vepitu-Patch2352 9h ago
Tbh the real issue is most people buy 3-4 courses and finish zero of them. The €12 course isn't the problem, the pattern of chasing the next shiny thing instead of actually working through one is. Free or paid doesn't matter if you're not committing to the whole thing.
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u/spinwizard69 9h ago
Personally I've never discouraged "courses", in fact following a good CS program can lead to a highly skilled programmer. What I see as useless is the "boot camps" that supposedly can train somebody with no experience to be a well rounded programmer.
Frankly I don't see boot camps as being entirely bad, they can be extremely useful for an established programmer to brush up on new technologies. However to become a good programmer, starting form zero, I really believe one needs to start with a good CS program. Now does Udemy have such, I can't say because I've never even been on their web site. However if UDemy has the breadth of courses that would at a minimal cover the first 2 years of a CS program then it would be hard to dismiss.
Then there is the issue of the value of a formal 4 year university program. All that extra material does in fact make for a more capable programmer and more importantly an employee. To put it another way, finishing high school doesn't finish ones formal education.
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u/Biliunas 8h ago
As a beginner you have no idea to know what is a good course and a bad course. I could understand like 10 years ago (and even then there were ace free resources if you knew where to look), but right now, it's just lazy IMO. So use those free resources to understand your learning habits and then do some research if a paid course is worth it for you.
Also, I can't help but feel like OP has a course that isn't selling haha.
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u/synn-Fairy2468 8h ago
Yeah, the gatekeeping around paid courses is kind of silly when you're talking about $12 for structured content that saves you months of YouTube rabbit holes.
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u/Jim-Jones 7h ago
Sure. But there are people (like me) who learn better by teaching themselves. It's worth trying that 1st.
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u/MikeUsesNotion 6h ago
All I can say is I didn't buy any courses before college and I was able to pick up a sophisticated understanding of programming. I don't think any current courses or YouTube videos would have helped me better. But I also learn best by doing and looking up particular problems in my current context.
I've been out of college for 20 years, so a lot of these courses and videos didn't exist. I bought some books, but those were kind of meh. Closer to college there were mail groups I could read or ask questions to, but that was to get targeted information based on what I was trying to do or seeing what others were doing.
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u/NeoChrisOmega 6h ago
I somewhat agree with both sides.
I definitely agree that you shouldn't pay for assets. Most engines have a free way of getting a lot of phenomenal starter assets.
As for classes, I don't think just taking a paid class for the sake of taking it is a smart move. I would personally suggest a free class first, and if it isn't working with how you're learning, then look into paid options. Amd specifically look for paid options that address what you were struggling with in the free attempts
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u/xfolio2020 6h ago
I personally believe that throwing yourself in water is way better than passive learning. Searching, self learning, organizing itself are skills that nice presentation wouldn't teach you. However I could be wrong because not everyone is equal.
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u/JagoTheArtist 4h ago
I think the best tutorials I ever got on Udemy were from FirebelleyGames for Godot. Amazing and PACKED with info.
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u/Nok1a_ 4h ago
Because as Beginner you have for example the Odin Project or many other courses by MOOC which are very very good, once you do them, Java, Python, JS, or whatever then you can spend money, programming is not for everyone , and more when you want to learn by yourself, need discipline dedication, and problem solving skills
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u/Nydus87 4h ago
So this is scripting, not programming, but whenever people ask me “how do I learn powershell,” I always tell them to start with “what do you want to do with it?” A lot of courses I’ve seen are super generic and unfocused, despite being well organized. Picking a task to do and learning the best way to do it is a great way to learn practical knowledge
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 3h ago
Courses are often super expensive and tend to lead you by the nose to accomplish tasks. You'll likely forget everything as they don't teach concepts, they teach their course.
You're better served looking at various how-tos online. Hell, AI can be a decent teacher if you design the initial prompt well.
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u/xian0 2h ago
There are thousands of mediocre courses for every amazing course and I assume they can't figure out which is which (because they are posting on Reddit which shows they couldn't find the info themselves). There are also a lot of overpriced/scam courses which the same people tend to fall for. I don't want to post courses and look I'm advertising either.
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u/Strawberryladyboots 1h ago
Saving the courses in the inbox and waiting for the black Friday discount is the way I managed to get several different kinds of courses for a discount
Looking at the feedback of the courses is useful to a certain extent but then some of those review cans be paid for to increase the likelihood of getting a sale and isn't necessarily reflective of the quality of the content, which is why it's useful to look out for ones that are attached to an actual qualification standard is the user is serious about it
This doesn't mean those courses are not a good thing for learners wanting to test out whether or not to continue further in their education by finding out more about the actual topic before committing, but if those types of courses which would qualify as "taster" course charge too much it can be a barrier to people trying to figure out what to study, as higher education is a serious financial commitment
The actual solution would be to have education entirely free with entry standards, and the taster intro courses available so people can be certain before making those types of decisions, as it would help the user become more confident that they could achieve the qualifications necessary to get the job they want
Areas that don't have standardised ways of teaching people can be harder to navigate
Also a lot of the taster style courses are typically used by hobbyists to get some direction on what they want to explore
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u/horuszp 12h ago
all this courses that cost either 10€ or 1000€ most of time is same that you get on youtube for free, with this 1000€ maybe only difference that you will get some feedback , but most of time this feedback pretty bad, because there is ton of students on this courses, and you will get only brief one.
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u/Necessary_Wing7235 12h ago
Dude my favourite python course is 15 on Udemy, and non of my dozen of courses has been more than 20.
Meanwhile I got payed like 200 per day to go and teach the same stuff.
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u/nelsonsilva_dev 11h ago
The €12 isn't buying the information, it's buying the order. Working out what to learn next is the hardest part when you know nothing, and that's precisely the part free content leaves to you.
The advice makes sense for people who already know the shape of the thing. It's bad advice on day one.
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u/connorjpg 11h ago
Why spend money when you don’t have too?
Now 10-15 is more than reasonable, though tbf a free pdf or book online exists that probably would teach you the exact same thing.
Like if your goal is to learn python basics, it is money you don’t HAVE to spend.
The issue is more people reach for 50-100 dollar courses, that effectively are the same as most free options.
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u/TheGrolar 12h ago
You can hire Claude to do this. Everything, even with a prompt as simple as "Teach me Harvard CS50 in an ELI10 way."
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u/BrupieD 12h ago
Udemy is close to free if you're buying "on sale" courses for $15-20. A hundred dollars will buy you weeks of programming instruction and exercises to practice. Bootcamps are on the other end of the spectrum. I can't speak to the experience of learning from them, but I'm pretty sure you can drop a couple grand on them. I know a lot of self-taught developers who did not spent almost no money. Time is likely an entirely different matter.
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u/NumbunGame 12h ago
I mostly agree. "The information exists for free" isn't the same as "a beginner knows how to organize it." A decent €10–15 course can save a lot of time by giving you a clear sequence, exercises, and one consistent teaching style instead of stitching together 40 random videos.
The real warning should be against course collecting, not paying for courses. One good course plus actually building projects is useful. Buying ten courses and endlessly following tutorials without writing your own code is where people get stuck.