I can't even remember how I used to learn before the ubiquity of the Internet. I don't mean academic learning—although in light of sites like Khan Academy (4 stars), we're getting pretty close—but the day-to-day knowledge that I need to do my job and get by in life. YouTube taught me how to knit. With Lynda.com (4 stars), an Editors' Choice for online learning, I picked up some invaluable photography techniques. AppSumo (prices vary; some free) is the latest addition to my learning toolkit, and it's an interesting if hard-to-grasp hybrid, offering daily deals for technology products as well as videos that teach principles that are central to tech-minded businesses.

The site itself is a little rough around the edges, as are the production standards for some of the video content, but the content is killer. Organization isn't the site's strong suit either, though it's been getting better little by little over the few months that I've had my eye on it. AppSumo has excellent content and very good deals on niche software tools—the kind of stuff you didn't even know you needed—if you can find it.

What AppSumo Offers
It took me some time to suss out what AppSumo sells, exactly, and first-time visitors to the site or those who sign up for the daily newsletter may feel the same. The name isn't exactly descriptive, and neither is the homepage. To summarize, AppSumo has daily deals on niche software products that you can buy through AppSumo and (usually) redeem from the provider with a code. It also has learning content in the form of videos, ebooks, and other digitally-distributed packages. All the software and learning content are suitable for people who work in the technology field to some capacity, which includes online marketing, website development, e-retail, and social media managers.

Prices
Some of AppSumo's content, like ebooks and small software products, are free. The website has an entire section of Free Deals that remains well stocked. Other purchases vary widely in price.. For example, the Social Media Krash Kourse, a series of videos that explained how to use Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, and SEO as a business, costs a mere $27. Another package of content, 35 Email Template to "Wow" Your Contacts & Get Results, is currently going for $35. An hour session with startup advisor Andrew Chen, however, costs $699 through AppSumo. Some of the deals are essentially consulting sessions, which explains why at 50 percent off, An Hour with Chief Sumo Noah Kagan (one of AppSumo's founders, who consults about growing one's business) still goes for $1,000. Considering what you might pay for one-on-one consulting, many of the deals offer enormous savings. The crash-course learning content also packs into a few short hours the same things you (or your employees) might spend several hours teaching yourself. Calculate what your own time costs, hourly, multiply that by the number of hours you might spend searching online for articles and tutorials from which you might learn the same things (say, roughly anywhere from two to six hours), and see for yourself what the cost-benefit might be for buying a course through AppSumo.

The software deals seem to be offering real discounts, most being at least 50 percent less than the advertised retail price, but it's tough to go into AppSumo knowing what app you need to buy and finding it. A better idea is to keep an eye on the newsletter to see if the kinds of tools you need surface.

Website and Quality of Services
The AppSumo website and the video content I watched were dynamic, as if the people behind it all are very passionate about what they do. But it can be dizzying. There's a lot to take it, and it all comes at you very fast. I remember reading a review of the movie The Social Network in which the reviewer said the characters seem to speak at the same rate that their computers process information. AppSumo feels like that sometimes. A lot of information, deals, tools, and ideas come at you very fast, and it takes work to keep up with it and make sense of the stream.

Since I began visiting AppSumo, the site has become more organized and easier to navigate, but it still takes some browsing to find what you think you might need.

Categories across the top navigation bar show: Featured Deal, Free Deals, All Deals, Suggest Deals, Categories, and Giveaways. Unless you want to browse for quite some time, jump into Categories, as it's the only tab that helps to shape your understanding of what you might find on AppSumo—and even then, there are caveats. For example, "Education" contains all the learning material across all topics, not education-related products and content. Other categories also perplexed me a little. "Developer" has what exactly? (Answer: Learning and tools for all kinds of developers, like Web developers, mobile app developers, coders, engineers.) A few categories seemed clearer: "Marketing/SEO" and "Wordpress" aren't so fuzzy.

When you buy a deal, it shows up in your AppSumo account, with instructions for how to retrieve or activate it. The landing page for your purchases looks a little rough, slapped together without much polish, but the instructions are crystal-clear.

As mentioned, I worked my way through the Social Media Krash Kourse, about two hours' worth of videos teaching the basics of Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, and SEO for small business owners and online marketing managers who need these sites and tools to do their jobs. While the production quality of the videos was amateur—almost always a single, unscripted take with shadows, echoes, and quick quips—the emphasis is unmistakably on delivering high quality ideas.

I could quibble with a few moments of misspoken words (thinking to myself, "he said 'and' repeatedly when clearly the operator was 'or'"), but it doesn't change the fact that the main presenter, Neville Medhora, clearly knows his stuff. The Krash Kourse was fast-paced, energetic, and at the same time as low-level as advertised. PDFs at the end of each video briefly summarized the main points, but didn't thorough outline everything, unlike say MediaBistro Online Courses and Seminars (3.5 stars), which tend to provide very thorough documentation. With AppSumo's learning, the meat is definitely in the videos.

To Be or Not To Be a Sumoling?
AppSumo has an edgy roughness to it, yes, but is rock solid in terms of the ideas and software they show its budding community (called "sumolings") of developers, SMBs, and others in careers that touch on technology and the Internet. The software deals are real, but steer toward more niche products. You won't find a bargain for Microsoft Office on AppSumo. And the offers for consulting, video tutorials, and other ways to learn about the business of tech are genuine. You can't go into AppSumo with a specific idea for what you want to learn in mind and come out satisfied, but if you're willing to explore and browse what the company offers, you can very well exit much more informed and reenergized.

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