• AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world
    1·
    10 months ago

    MOOCs.

    They’re free unless you want a “certificate”, which has no practical value and is mostly useful if you want to motivate yourself a bit more and want to support their business model.

    Go browse Coursera and edX and learn to your heart’s content.

    Also, if you’re coding, watch recordings of conferences about your programming language, e.g. CppCon/C++Now/CppNorth for C++, PyCon/PyData for Python etc…

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Open Library allows you to digitally borrow a ton of books for free. It’s not the greatest experience since the books they own are scanned and not digital copies, but it’s good enough, and their catalogue is not half bad.

      • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Just legality. These are paid books that they can’t give away for free, but acting as a library they can let you borrow them, read them, and “return” them.

        In practice you’ll rarely feel this system because you can just re-borrow it whenever you want to read it.

        • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Just legality.

          The legality was only ever a grey area. Their days may be numbered, however. During the lockdowns they removed the one physical copy per digital copy lent, and as a result of that they got sued. Instead of settling out of court they drummed up donations to a legal fund and lost hard, and during the trial a judge ruled that their practice was illegal. In my opinion, they should have done everything they could have to settle out of court, rather than try and build a frivilous defense that had no grounding in law.

          Right now, they’re appealing it, so I guess that’s why it’s still up. However it looks like their strategy isn’t any better now than it was then.

          But hey, their laywer’s getting paid.