Non-fiction books a better investment than online college course, aren't they?

If you’re looking for the closest thing to a college education,  this information will be extremely helpful for you:

It depends on what you mean by non-fiction books.

If you mean textbooks, and you have the follow-through to actually work through the examples, then yes. Textbooks come in a wide variety of levels of expertise, from high school up to graduate level difficulty, which will allow you to work up to whatever level you would like. They are what most college professors use when assigning reading and homework. There are high quality textbooks on every subject imaginable, as wide or as niche as you like. If you are diligent and the right kind of learner, textbooks will take you much farther than online college courses.

In contrast, most online college courses do not go into the technical depth that college courses do, neither in their lectures or their homework. The short lecture style of online courses, while meant to aid learning, don’t allow the teacher to explain concepts and derivations that simply cannot be explained in 15 minutes.

(If you meant non-fiction books like popular science books, than those will not teach you what you would learn if you got a college education in the subject. They are fascinating, motivate interest, and are an excellent addition to a college education but not a replacement.)

This is not to say that textbooks are great and equivalent to going to college, or that online college courses are useless, or that this answer is the same for everyone. Neither textbooks nor online courses are a great way to learn, and everyone learns best differently. Most people seem to agree that textbooks aren’t great, but I believe online classes also fail to achieve the same standards as technical classes.

Online courses provide motivators that textbooks will never have: deadlines, a community, a grade. Some even assign reading from textbooks. In addition, textbooks are generally quite boring and will take far longer to read than watching lectures. I’m suggesting that if you are looking to understand highly technical knowledge on your own, textbooks will get you further than online courses.