How to Learn Anything on the Web

A tutorial or class for almost everything and anything is available online these days. Whether you're looking to beef up your résumé with some new skills, to get a degree while waiting for the job market to pick up, or simply to have a little fun learning something new, the Web has a wealth of educational resources-many of them free of charge.

To give you some ideas, we've put together a list of sites in several categories, from skills for budding entrepreneurs and learning foreign languages to gourmet cooking and the choreography for Michael Jackson's iconic Thriller dance.

You can always Google for anything you don't see here, but be careful as you click. In researching this story, I ran into many sites that either tried to sell me classes (with little or no real free instruction) or were infested with pop-ups and adware. Antimalware software is a must. (See PC World's free downloads of antimalware programs.)

Get a Business Up and Running

So you have a business in mind? Start with a business plan that outlines the specifics of how you intend to make money-essential for attracting investors and useful for your own reality checks. BPlans.com, run by PaloAlto Software (creators of Business Plan Pro software) offers dozens of articles, sample plans, and templates to help you get going. This is one of the few sites that, while it does market a product (you need its software to edit a sample plan and use it for your own enterprise), delivers a slew of genuinely useful content for free. (And you can always simply recreate the sample plan using Word and Excel.)

Once you've launched your business, you'll have to keep financial records. But even if you use software such as Quickbooks, it's a good idea to understand how basic accounting works. Small business consultant Dave Marshall's Bean Counter site features free tutorials on basic business accounting and bookkeeping.

And because so many aspects of business require presentation skills, it's useful to have a working knowledge of Microsoft's PowerPoint. About.com's Presentation Software site provides a Beginner's Guide to PowerPoint that gathers 11 tutorials to get you going.

Your business will need a Web site too. You can pay someone a lot of money to create it, but if you would like to dig into the complexities of modern Web design, LearnWebDesignOnline.com is a good place to start, with links to tutorials, videos, and books on all aspects of site creation. Another resource is SiteGround, a Web hosting company that provides an impressive tutorials page for learning about both Web hosting in general and a wide array of specific applications for content management and site creation (WordPress, Dreamweaver, and the like).

If you're interested in putting together a news site, J-Learning.org provides guidance on everything from blogging tools and multimedia creation to SEO and legal issues-all for free.

To help bring visitors to your site, you'll need to learn the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). Search consultants SEOmoz's free Beginners Guide is a good place to start.

Improve Your Tech Skills

Okay, time out for a little self-promotion. For general hardware upgrades, setup instruction, and software tips, look no further than PC World's own How-To page. Organized by category, there's an amazing wealth of guidance (in print, video, and slide shows) for everything from swapping out a PC's processor to getting Microsoft Office to work better.

However, for professional in-depth training in specific applications, Lynda.com has established itself as the go-to place, with thousands of videos and tutorial files for hundreds of applications. It's not free, but if you're serious about learning a complicated application, its subscription-based fees are a good value. (Read PC World's recent review of Lynda.com.)

Have you ever wanted to explore the mysteries of computer programming? You can find a slew of programming tutorials online, but I like British programmer Alan Gauld's Learning to Program, an online version of a book he's written. It's not particularly slick, but he writes clearly and accessibly, and he uses Python, which experts tell me is a good programming language to start with.

Next: Formal Education, Languages, and Life Skills

Formal Education

The Internet has turned distance learning into a reality: Today, you can get all sorts of degrees and professional certificates through online courses. But not all online learning institutions are created equal. To avoid scams, start your search for Web-based higher education at The Sloan Consortium's Sloan-C Catalog. It's a list of degree and certificate programs offered by regionally accredited institutions who have become Consortium members (either because they've received grant support from the respected Alfred P. Sloan Foundation or through a peer-review process). You can search by discipline, type of degree or certificate, state, or institution name.

If you or someone you know wants to earn a GED (General Educational Development) credential (the equivalent of a high-school diploma), learn about the process from the organization that administers the GDE program, The American Council on Education. You can't take the test online, but dozens of sites offer to prep you-and many of them look pretty sleazy, so I'd stick with the ACE's links to practice tests and educational resources.

If you don't care about getting a degree and simply want to broaden your horizons, head over to YouTube EDU, a very cool YouTube subsite devoted to videos of interviews, courses, and lectures from professors at top colleges and universities. Some are mostly course promos (such as Carnegie Mellon physics professor Barry Luokkala's description of his Science and Science Fiction course) but some have real content (such as this MIT course on creating compilers).

Learn a Foreign Language

It's easy to find sites that sell foreign-language instruction online. But here are some neat ones that don't charge for instruction and also offer audio clips:

Chinese (Mandarin): Chinese-Tools.com, the English-language version of a site run by a native French speaker who has lived in China for six years, is a fantastic resource. It not only has audio clips (crucial since Chinese depends on tone and inflection as well as simple pronunciation), but also calligraphy instruction.

French: About.com's French Language site provides lessons for beginners as well as interesting extras including sections on idiomatic expressions and typical Gallic gestures.

Italian: Oggi e Domani (which means "today and tomorrow" in Italian) focuses on conversations in its lesson-based approach.

Russian: I found a couple of sites that seem to be duking it out for supremacy in free online Russian-language instruction: Russian Lessons.net and Learning Russian.net. Of the two, Learning Russian.net looks slicker, but Russian Lessons.net appears to have more resources.

Spanish: 123TeachMe offers Spanish lessons for beginners, advanced students, and tourists (conversational Spanish).

Life Skills

Some things you just can't learn in traditional classrooms. Real Simple has tons of how-tos for around-the house skills-I like the Daily Quick-Cleaning Checklist, which promises to get your pad presentable in under half an hour. For the truly domestically challenged, WikiHow has a page on how to make your bed.

EmilyPost.com, the Web home of the Emily Post Institute, does get a little heavy-handed on selling books by the late doyenne of good manners and her descendants, but there are lots of free articles that provide advice on specific etiquette dilemmas.

And if you're looking to make dinner with whatever's in your refrigerator, simply enter the ingredients into the search fields of FoodNetwork.com, Epicurious or RecipeSource (formerly SOAR, or the Searchable Online Archive of Recipes). For really great how-to's (not to mention recipes and juried product and equipment ratings), consider investing $35 a year (less if you subscribe in print, too) in the online version of Cook's Illustrated, the ad-free Consumer Reports of cooking.

Need help with your finances? Motley Fool is one of the oldest and best sites to learn about investing and personal finance (and their discussion boards are great, too). If you're looking ahead to retirement, the Labor Department's Consumer Information on Retirement page answers a lot of questions on private pensions, 401ks, and the like.

Next: Sports and Games, Performing Arts

Have Some Fun

Learn to play a game: ChessDryad.com's How to Play Chess page will get you from learning the mechanics of the game to classic moves, with primers and flash animations. Veteran bridge author Richard Pavlicek has put his Bridge Basics textbook online for people wishing to learn the popular card game. For neophyte poker players, Charles Bloom has put up a Texas Hold'em primer.

For sports (or anything else highly physical and visual), you can't beat YouTube: For example, I found dozens of skateboarding how-tos, but the one I actually felt I could learn from was this unpolished but accessible effort credited to one "Eswolowski" and posted by a user named tevens22.

However, not all sports stuff is on YouTube. Aspiring soccer moms and pops should check out How to Play Soccer, which not only teaches the rules of the game, but offers tips for parents who serve as coaches or spectators.

Showbiz Stuff

Aspiring musicians, dancers and filmmakers can also find instruction online. SoYouWanna.com offers a guide for making low-budget movies.

Like to sing along in perfect harmony? ChoralWiki maintains a database of free choral sheet music. If your garage band needs help figuring out the guitar solo in Dire Straits' "Sultans of Swing," head to 911tabs, a very nifty search engine for tablatures (musical annotations showing fingerings for specific pop and rock songs). You can search by song and by instrument.

Verizon scores $245 million HHS contract

Verizon Business will make as much as $245 million providing the Department of Health and Human Services with telecom services through 2015, the company said Tuesday.

Under the contract, which was administered under the Washington Interagency Telecommunications System, Verizon will supply the HHS with voice and data services, dedicated voice mail, and audio, video and Web conferencing. The deal will be worth up to $245 million if all of its options are exercised, Verizon says. The HHS figures to be a particularly important federal agency over the next few years, as its public health research and food and drug safety programs figure to play a key role in implementing healthcare reform.

Verizon's $245 million deal is the third major government contract that the company has won this year. Earlier, Verizon signed a massive $2.5 billion deal with the Department of Defense to provide fully managed transmission services for the for its Pacific-region Defense Information Network System (DISN) that covers military installations in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as regions of Canada, Central and South America and the Middle East. The network is the Defense Department's official enterprise-class network for providing data, video and voice services. Marlin Forbes, a regional vice president for Verizon Federal, says the network supports everything from personnel and medical systems to intelligence programs.

Verizon also signed a $108 million deal in January to provide teleconferencing services to government space agency NASA. Under the terms of that contract, Verizon is due to provide NASA with audio, video and Web conferencing services through 2017. Although Verizon has provided NASA with all of its teleconferencing services since 2001, the new contract states that the carrier must also provide high-definition IP video conferencing that will serve as an upgrade to NASA's current video conferencing system.

VMware offering 'safe passage' to Virtual Iron users

VMware is trying to exploit uncertainty among customers of Virtual Iron, the virtualization vendor recently acquired by Oracle, with a new "safe passage" plan that offers Virtual Iron users steep discounts on certain VMware products if they switch.

Specifically, VMware is offering 40 percent discounts off list price for its vSphere 4 Advanced Edition and Enterprise Plus Edition, as well as vCenter Server Foundation and vCenter Server Standard.

In addition, the vendor will take 10 percent off the cost of support and subscription contracts for one year on those products. Two or three-year contracts don't qualify for the discount, however.

The offer is valid through Sept. 30, according to VMware. Customers must prove they have a current Virtual Iron support contract, and the amount of Virtual Iron sockets listed on that contract must be the same or more than the number of CPUs of VMware product they buy.

A VMware spokesman did not immediately respond Tuesday to a query about whether VMware is also offering other key enticements, such as fixed-price services engagements for handling the transition to its software.

"Migration from one platform to another is always challenging, irrespective of the tooling or resources applied to the task," said Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. "Virtualization is no exception to this rule. That said, in situations such as this, where support has or will be discontinued, the drivers compelling migration often become more powerful than the obstacles to it."

Oracle bought Virtual Iron in May to round out its Oracle VM product family. It was specifically interested in Virtual Iron's dynamic resource management and rapid server provisioning capabilities, according to a FAQ document released earlier this year.

The FAQ sheet indicated Oracle has no intention of continuing to sell Virtual Iron's products in stand-alone form, saying the vendor will "fully integrate Virtual Iron technology into Oracle VM" and that any enhancements to Virtual Iron's software would be "delivered as a part of the combined solution."

But it is not clear when such a product will be released, or whether any components of Virtual Iron's technology will not survive, creating a cloudy picture for customers.

One Virtual Iron customer, the Baltimore, Maryland, law firm Goodell, DeVries, Leech & Dann LLP, is "absolutely" looking to migrate to another platform, said David Roden, director of technology.

"For us, it's almost like there's really no choice based on what we've seen from Oracle. So far, it's clear there's no future for Virtual Iron." Roden said.

Other than a few form letters, including an e-mail that told the company how to register for support through Oracle's network, the firm "hasn't really heard anything" from the vendor, according to Roden.

The firm is "not especially" interested in waiting for Oracle's merged product, because time is of the essence. "You just don't implement a new virtualization system overnight. There's no point in waiting."

Roden is starting to look at alternatives now, including VMware, but the field of prospects is small.

"The obstacle to VMware has always been price, not features or capabilities," he said. "It really comes down to, are we going to bite the bullet and spend the money for VMware or look at what is still an immature product in [Microsoft's] Hyper-V."

When it occurs, the conversion project will be a "huge" undertaking for the 135-employee firm, Roden said. "When we first put Virtual Iron in production we had zero virtual servers. Now I've got 25 of them that will have to be converted."